text:
Will Durant

William James Durant (5 November 1885 – 7 November 1981) was an American historian, philosopher and writer, best remembered for his works The Story of Philosophy, and The Story of Civilization.

 * See also The Story of Civilization

Quotes

 * I felt more keenly than before the need of a philosophy that would do justice to the infinite vitality of nature. In the inexhaustible activity of the atom, in the endless resourcefulness of plants, in the teeming fertility of animals, in the hunger and movement of infants, in the laughter and play of children, in the love and devotion of youth, in the restless ambition of fathers and the lifelong sacrifice of mothers, in the undiscourageable researches of scientists and the sufferings of genius, in the crucifixion of prophets and the martyrdom of saints — in all things I saw the passion of life for growth and greatness, the drama of everlasting creation. I came to think of myself, not as a dance and chaos of molecules, but as a brief and minute portion of that majestic process... I became almost reconciled to mortality, knowing that my spirit would survive me enshrined in a fairer mold... and that my little worth would somehow be preserved in the heritage of men. In a measure the Great Sadness was lifted from me, and, where I had seen omnipresent death, I saw now everywhere the pageant and triumph of life.
 * Transition (1927)

 * Surely, the time has come for the intellectuals, the liberals, and the radicals of the world to speak out about this new slavery, to call it clearly and bluntly what it is. For it can no longer be doubted that in this dictatorship of the politicians is to be found every abuse which liberals and radicals have denounced in their own society for generations. . . . the Soviet has allowed it people to starve by the thousands. . . . It has choked all competition, and made itself a monopoly of monopolies; it has restored serfdom, conscription of labor, and indentured servitude among a people that has recently liberated itself by revolution and civil war, from these feudal chains; . . . it has kept wages low and labor intense, it has made democracy in the factory only a sham; it has herded and regimented its people like cattle. It has pitilessly industrialized its women under the pretense of emancipating them; it has crowded the population into dingy quarters, and offered every discouragement to the creation of homes. . . . . It is stifled the growth of democracy, and has centralized power into dictatorship of fanatics and machines; it has waged a class war against the peasants, tradesmen, and mental workers; . . . there is no opportunity for the expression of the public will; . . . it has oppressed with unsurpassed barbarity men and women guilty of no other crime than the prosperity attendant upon enterprise, industry, intelligence, and thrift; it has refused to the rights of habeas corpus, of trial by jury, of equality before the law; it has sent it secret police into millions of homes; . . . it has terrorized the public with marching armies, secret police, merciless penalties, and a million spies. It has deported or shot hundreds of thousands of men and women solely for political heresy and non-conformance. It has subjected to censorship every drama and every book, even every opera; it has prostituted the press, the radio and the stage . . . It has suppressed all freedom of speech or assembly, and in effect has raised a thousand obstacles against the freedom of worship and belief. . . Slavery, barbarism and desolation—these fundamentally, despite a thousand minor virtues, is what Russia is today.
 * The Tragedy of Russia: Impressions from a brief visit , New York, NY, Simon and Schuster (1933) pp. 150-54

 * Most of our literature and social philosophy after 1850 was the voice of freedom against authority, of the child against the parent, of the pupil against the teacher. Through many years I shared in that individualistic revolt. I do not regret it; it is the function of youth to defend liberty and innovation, of the old to defend order and tradition, and of middle age to find a middle way. But now that I too am old, I wonder whether the battle I fought was not too completely won. Let us say humbly but publicly that we resent corruption in politics, dishonesty in business, faithlessness in marriage, pornography in literature, coarseness in language, chaos in music, meaninglessness in art.
 * “The Second Sexual Revolution”, Time magazine, (24 January 1964)

 * Sixty years ago I knew everything. Now I know nothing. Education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance.
 * Quoted in "Books: The Great Gadfly", Time magazine, 8 October 1965 (review of The Age of Voltaire by Will and Ariel Durant)

 * The only real revolution is in the enlightenment of the mind and the improvement of character, the only real emancipation is individual, and the only real revolutionists are philosophers and saints.
 * The Lessons of History (1968), p. 72 (co-authored with Ariel Durant)

 * Love one another. My final lesson of history is the same as that of Jesus. You may think that's a lot of lollipop but just try it. Love is the most practical thing in the world. If you take an attitude of love toward everybody you meet, you'll eventually get along.
 * When asked, at the age of 92, if he could summarize the lessons of history into a single sentence. As quoted in "Durants on History from the Ages, with Love," by Pam Proctor, Parade (6 August 1978) p. 12. Durant is quoting Jesus (from John 13:34) here, and might also be quoting Jiddu Krishnamurti: "Love is the most practical thing in the world. To love, to be kind, not to be greedy, not to be ambitious, not to be influenced by people but to think for yourself — these are all very practical things, and they will bring about a practical, happy society."

 * It is a mistake to think that the past is dead. Nothing that has ever happened is quite without influence at this moment. The present is merely the past rolled up and concentrated in this second of time. You, too, are your past; often your face is your autobiography; you are what you are because of what you have been; because of your heredity stretching back into forgotten generations; because of every element of environment that has affected you, every man or woman that has met you, every book that you have read, every experience that you have had; all these are accumulated in your memory, your body, your character, your soul. So with a city, a country, and a race; it is its past, and cannot be understood without it.
 * As quoted in "The Gentle Philosopher" (2006) by John Little at the Will Durant Foundation

 * Perhaps the cause of our contemporary pessimism is our tendency to view history as a turbulent stream of conflicts — between individuals in economic life, between groups in politics, between creeds in religion, between states in war. This is the more dramatic side of history; it captures the eye of the historian and the interest of the reader. But if we turn from that Mississippi of strife, hot with hate and dark with blood, to look upon the banks of the stream, we find quieter but more inspiring scenes: women rearing children, men building homes, peasants drawing food from the soil, artisans making the conveniences of life, statesmen sometimes organizing peace instead of war, teachers forming savages into citizens, musicians taming our hearts with harmony and rhythm, scientists patiently accumulating knowledge, philosophers groping for truth, saints suggesting the wisdom of love. History has been too often a picture of the bloody stream. The history of civilization is a record of what happened on the banks.
 * As quoted in "The Gentle Philosopher" (2006) by John Little at Will Durant Foundation

 * To speak ill of others is a dishonest way of praising ourselves; let us be above such transparent egotism. If you can't say good and encouraging things, say nothing. Nothing is often a good thing to do, and always a clever thing to say.
 * We Have a Right To Be Happy Today, commencement address at the Webb School of Claremont, California (7 June 1958)

 * Civilization exists by geological consent, subject to change without notice.
 * "What is Civilization?" Ladies' Home Journal, LXIII (January, 1946)

 * The invention and spread of contraceptives is the proximate cause of our changing morals. The old moral code restricted sexual experience to marriage, because copulation could not be effectively separated from parentage, and parentage could be made responsible only through marriage. But to-day the dissociation of sex from reproduction has created a situation unforeseen by our fathers. All the relations of men and women are being changed by this one factor; and the moral code of the future will have to take account of these new facilities which invention has placed at the service of ancient desires.
 * Our Changing Morals, in The Mansions of Philosophy: A Survey of Human Life and Destiny (1929), Ch. 5. p. 119

 * I know how unfashionable it is now to acknowledge in life or history any genius loftier than ourselves. Our democratic dogma has leveled not only all voters but all leaders; we delight to show that living geniuses are only mediocrities, and that dead ones are myths. … Since it is contrary to good manners to exalt ourselves, we achieve the same result by slyly indicating how inferior are the great men of the earth. In some of us, perhaps, it is a noble and merciless asceticism, which would root out of our hearts the last vestige of worship and adoration, lest the old gods should return and terrify us again. For my part, I cling to this final religion, and discover in it a content and stimulus more lasting than came from the devotional ecstasies of youth.
 * The Greatest Minds and Ideas of All Time (2002) edited by John Little, Ch. 1 : The Shameless Worship of Heroes

Philosophy and the Social Problem (1917)

 * History is a process of rebarbarization. A people made vigorous by arduous physical conditions of life, and driven by the increasing exigencies of survival, leaves its native habitat, moves down upon a less vigorous people, conquers, displaces, or absorbs it. Habits of resolution and activity developed in a less merciful environment now rapidly produce an economic surplus; and part of the resources so accumulated serve as capital in a campaign of imperialist conquest. The growing surplus generates a leisure class, scornful of physical activity and adept in the arts of luxury. Leisure begets speculation; speculation dissolves dogma and corrodes custom, develops sensitivity of perception and destroys decision of action. Thought, adventuring in a labyrinth of analysis, discovers behind society the individual; divested of its normal social function it turns inward and discovers the self. The sense of common interest, of commonwealth, wanes; there are no citizens now, there are only individuals. From afar another people, struggling against the forces of an obdurate environment, sees here the cleared forests, the liberating roads, the harvest of plenty, the luxury of leisure. It dreams, aspires, dares, unites, invades. The rest is as before. Rebarbarization is rejuvenation. The great problem of any civilization is how to rejuvenate itself without rebarbarization.

 * The rise of philosophy, then, often heralds the decay of a civilization. Speculation begins with nature and begets naturalism; it passes to man—first as a psychological mystery and then as a member of society—and begets individualism. Philosophers do not always desire these results; but they achieve them. They feel themselves the unwilling enemies of the state: they think of men in terms of personality while the state thinks of men in terms of social mechanism. Some philosophers would gladly hold their peace, but there is that in them which will out; and when philosophers speak, gods and dynasties fall. Most states have had their roots in heaven, and have paid the penalty for it: the twilight of the gods is the afternoon of states. Every civilization comes at last to the point where the individual, made by speculation conscious of himself as an end per se, demands of the state, as the price of its continuance, that it shall henceforth enhance rather than exploit his capacities. Philosophers sympathize with this demand, the state almost always rejects it: therefore civilizations come and civilizations go. The history of philosophy is essentially an account of the efforts great men have made to avert social disintegration by building up natural moral sanctions to take the place of the supernatural sanctions which they themselves have destroyed. To find—without resorting to celestial machinery—some way of winning for their people social coherence and permanence without sacrificing plasticity and individual uniqueness to regimentation,—that has been the task of philosophers, that is the task of philosophers.

The Story of Philosophy (1926)

 * Science tells us how to heal and how to kill; it reduces the death rate in retail and then kills us wholesale in war; but only wisdom — desire coordinated in the light of all experience — can tell us when to heal and when to kill. To observe processes and to construct means is science; to criticize and coordinate ends is philosophy: and because in these days our means and instruments have multiplied beyond our interpretation and synthesis of ideals and ends, our life is full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. For a fact is nothing except in relation to desire; it is not complete except in relation to a purpose and a whole. Science without philosophy, facts without perspective and valuation, cannot save us from havoc and despair. Science gives us knowledge, but only philosophy can give us wisdom.
 * Introduction : On the Uses of Philosophy

 * Excellence is an art won by training and habituation: we do not act rightly because we have virtue or excellence, but we rather have these because we have acted rightly; 'these virtues are formed in man by his doing the actions'; we are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit: 'the good of man is a working of the soul in the way of excellence in a complete life... for as it is not one swallow or one fine day that makes a spring, so it is not one day or a short time that makes a man blessed and happy'.
 * p. 87; the quoted phrases within the quotation are from the Nicomachean Ethics, Book II, 4; Book I, 7

 * Philosophy accepts the hard and hazardous task of dealing with problems not yet open to the methods of science — problems like good and evil, beauty and ugliness, order and freedom, life and death; so soon as a field of inquiry yields knowledge susceptible of exact formulation it is called science. Every science begins as philosophy and ends as art; it arises in hypothesis and flows into achievement.

 * Philosophy is a hypothetical interpretation of the unknown (as in metaphysics), or of the inexactly known (as in ethics or political philosophy); it is the front trench in the siege of truth.

 * Great organizers, as much as inevitable slaves, tend to stoic moods: it is difficult to be either master or servant if one is sensitive.

 * The death of Alexander (323 BC) quickened this process of decay. The boy-emperor, barbarian though he remained after all of Aristotle’s tutoring, had yet learned to revere the rich culture of Greece, and had dreamed of spreading that culture through the Orient in the wake of his victorious armies.... But he had underrated the inertia and resistance of the Oriental mind, and the mass and depth of Oriental culture. It was only a youthful fancy, after all, to suppose that so immature and unstable a civilization as that of Greece could be imposed upon a civilization immeasurably more widespread, and rooted in the most venerable traditions. The quantity of Asia proved too much for the quality of Greece.

 * [on Epicurus] His starting point is a conviction that apathy is impossible, and that pleasure — though not necessarily sensual pleasure — is the only conceivable, and quite legitimate, end of life and action. “Nature leads every organism to prefer its own good to every other good” — even the stoic finds a subtle pleasure in renunciation. “We must not avoid pleasures, but we must select them”. Epicurus, then, is no epicurean, he exalts the joys of intellect rather than those of sense; he warns against pleasures that excite and disturb the soul which they should rather quite and appease. In the end he proposes to seek not pleasure in its usual sense, but ataraxia — tranquility, equaninimity, repose of mind; all of which trembles on the verge of Zeno’s “Apathy”

 * ...Lucretius talked epicureanism stoically (like Heine’s Englishman taking his pleasures sadly), and concluded on his stren gospel of pleasure by committing suicide. His noble epic “on the Nature of Things", follows Epicurus in damning pleasure with faint praise. Almost contemporary with Caesar and Pompey, he lived in the midst of turmoil and alarms; his nervous pen is forever inditing prayers to tranquility and peace. One pictures him as a timid soul whose youth had been darkened with religious fears; for he never tires of telling his readers that there's no hell, except here, and there are no gods except gentlemanly ones who live in a garden of Epicurus in the clouds, and never intrude in the affairs of men.

 * [after quoting from Lucretius] In the face of warfare and inevitable death, there is no wisdom but in ataraxia, “to look on all things with a mind at peace"." Here, clearly, the old pagan joy of life is gone, and an almost exotic spirit touches a broken lyre. History, which is nothing if not humorous, was never so facetious as when she gave to this abstemious and epic pessimist the name of Epicurean.

 * Nothing in all literature is so depressing as the “Dissertations” of the slave [Epictetus], unless it be the “Meditations” of the Emperor [Marcus Aurelius] ...[after some excerpts from the two books]..... In such passages we feel the proximity of Christianity and its dauntless martyrs; indeed were not the Christian ethic of self-denial, the Christian political ideal of an almost communistic brotherhood of man, and the Christian eschatology of the final conflagration of all the world, fragments of Stoic doctrine floating on the stream of thought? In Epictetus the Greco-Roman soul has lost its paganism, and is ready for a new faith".

 * Both Stoicism and Epicureanism — the apathetic acceptance of defeat, and the effort to forget defeat in the arms of pleasure — were theories as to how one might yet be happy though subjugated or enslaved; precisely as the stoicism of Schopenhauer and the despondent epicureanism of Renan were in the nineteenth century the symbols of a shattered revolution and a broken France.

The Case for India (1931)

 * India was the motherland of our race, and Sanskrit the mother of Europe's languages: she was the mother of our philosophy; mother, through the Arabs, of much of our mathematics; mother, through the Buddha, of the ideals embodied in Christianity; mother, through the village community, of self-government and democracy. Mother India is in many ways the mother of us all.

 * It is true that even across the Himalayan barrier India has sent to the west, such gifts as grammar and logic, philosophy and fables, hypnotism and chess, and above all numerals and the decimal system.

 * India will teach us the tolerance and gentleness of mature mind, understanding spirit and a unifying, pacifying love for all human beings.

 * It might have been supposed that the building of 30,000 miles of railways would have brought a measure of prosperity to India. But these railways were built not for India but for England; not for the benefit of the Hindu, but for the purposes of the British army and British trade... The railroads are entirely in European hands, and the Government refuse to appoint even one Hindu to the Railway Board. The railways lose money year after year, and are helped by the Government out of the revenues of the people. All the loses are borne by the people, all the gains are gathered by the trader.

 * British rule in India is the most sordid and criminal exploitation of one nation by another in all recorded history. I propose to show that England has year by year been bleeding India to the point of death, and that self-government of India by the Hindus could not within any reasonable probability, have worse results than the present form of alien domination.

 * This, evidently was not a minor civilization, produced by inferior people. It ranks with the highest civilizations of history, and some, like Keyserling, would place it at the head and summit of all. The British conquest of India was the invasion and destruction of a high civilization by a trading company utterly without scruple or principle, careless of art, greedy of gain, overrunning with fire and sword a country temporarily disordered and helpless, bribing and murdering, annexing and stealing, and beginning that career of illegal and "legal" plunder which has now gone on ruthlessly for one hundred and seventy-three years, and goes on at this moment while in our secure comfort we write and read. Those who have seen the unspeakable poverty and physiological weakness of the Hindus today will hardly believe that it was the wealth of eighteenth century India which attracted the commercial pirates of England and France.

 * Never had a colony or a possession made so a great sacrifice for the master country. Every Hindu conscious of India looked forward hopefully now, as a reward for this bloody loyalty, to the admission of his country into the fellowship of free dominions under the English flag. After the war, Lloyd George, then Premier, declared with unstatesmanlike, clarity that Britain intended always to rule India, that there must always, remain in India "a steel frame" of British power and British dominance. This was the best traditions of imperialistic hypocrisy. The Montagu-Chelmsform reform fell short of promises. Dr. Rutherford, a Member of Parliament, wrote: "Never in the history of the world was such a hoax perpetrated upon a great people as England perpetrated upon India, when in return for India's invaluable service during the War, we gave to the Indian nation such a discreditable, disgraceful, undemocratic, tyrannical constitution. (source: The Case for India - By Will Durant Simon and Schuster, New York. 1930 p. 123-128).

 * Sir William Hunter, estimated that 40,000,000 of the people of India were seldom or never able to satisfy their hunger. In 1901, 272,000 died of plague introduced from abroad, in 1902, 500,000 died of plague; in 1903, 800,000; in 1904, 1,000,000. We can now understand why there are famines in India. Their cause, in plain terms, is not the absence of food, but the inability of the people to pay for it. It was hoped the railways would solve the problem...the fact that the worst famines have come since the building of the railways...behind all these, as the fundamental source of the terrible famines in India, lies such merciless exploitation, such unbalanced exploitation of goods, and such brutal collection of high taxes in the very midst of famine.... (source: The Case for India - By Will Durant Simon and Schuster, New York. 1930 p.50-53).

 * The news of this barbaric orgy of military sadism was kept from the world for half a year. A belated commission of inquiry was appointed by the Government. A committee appointed by the Indian National Congress made a more through investigation and reported 1,200 killed, and 3,600 wounded. Gen. Dyer was censured by the House of Commons, exonerated by the House of Lords, and was retired on a pension. Thinking this was insufficient the militarists of the Empire raised a fund of $150,000 for him and presented him with a jeweled sword of honor.   (source: The Case for India - By Will Durant Simon and Schuster, New York. 1930 p. This book was banned by the British Government. Durant held the view that no part of the world suffered so much poverty andoppression as India did and that this was largely due to British imperialism).

 * When the British came there was, throughout India, a system of communal schools, managed by the village communities. The agents of the East India Company destroyed these village communities, and took steps to replace the schools; even today, after a century of effort to restore them, they stand at only 66% of their number a hundred years ago. Hence, the 93 % illiteracy of India. (source: The Case for India - By Will Durant Simon and Schuster, New York. 1930 p.44).

Declaration of INTERdependence (1945)

 * Introduced into the US Congressional Record on October 1, 1945 (PDF Document)

 * Human progress having reached a high level through respect for the liberty and dignity of men, it has become desirable to re-affirm these evident truths:
 * That differences of race, color, and creed are natural, and that diverse groups, institutions, and ideas are stimulating factors in the development of man;
 * That to promote harmony in diversity is a responsible task of religion and statesmanship;
 * That since no individual can express the whole truth, it is essential to treat with understanding and good will those whose views differ from our own;
 * That by the testimony of history intolerance is the door to violence, brutality and dictatorship; and
 * That the realization of human interdependence and solidarity is the best guard of civilization.

 * Rooted in freedom, bonded in the fellowship of danger, sharing everywhere a common human blood, we declare again that all men are brothers, and that mutual tolerance is the price of liberty.

I - Our Oriental Heritage (1935)

 * Our Oriental Heritage'' online at the Internet Archive

 * Nothing should more deeply shame the modern student than the recency and inadequacy of his acquaintance with India. Here is a vast peninsula of nearly two million square miles; two-thirds as large as the United States, and twenty times the size of its master, Great Britain; 320,000,000 souls, more than in all North and South America combined, or one-fifth of the population of the earth; an impressive continuity of development and civilization from Mohenjo-daro, 2900 B.C. or earlier, to Gandhi, Raman and Tagore; faiths compassing every stage from barbarous idolatry to the most subtle and spiritual pantheism; philosophers playing a thousand variations on one monistic theme from the Upanishads eight centuries before Christ to Shankara eight centuries after him; scientists developing astronomy three thousand years ago, and winning Nobel prizes in our own time; a democratic constitution of untraceable antiquity in the villages, and wise and beneficent rulers like Ashoka and Akbar in the capitals; minstrels singing great epics almost as old as Homer, and poets holding world audiences today; artists raising gigantic temples for Hindu gods from Tibet to Ceylon and from Cambodia to Java, or carving perfect palaces by the score for Mogul kings and queens — this is the India that patient scholarship is now opening up, like a new intellectual continent, to that Western mind which only yesterday thought civilization an exclusively European thing.
 * Ch. XIV : The Foundations of India § I : Scene of the Drama

II - Life of Greece (1939)

 * Full text online at the Internet Archive

 * All the problems that disturb us today—the cutting down of forests and the erosion of the soil; the emancipation of woman and the limitation of the family; the conservatism of the established, and the experimentalism of the unplaced, in morals, music, and government; the corruptions of politics and the perversions of conduct; the conflict of religion and science, and the weakening of the supernatural supports of morality; the war of the classes, the nations, and the continents; the revolutions of the poor against the economically powerful rich, and of the rich against the politically powerful poor; the struggle between democracy and dictatorship, between individualism and communism, between the East and the West—all these agitated, as if for our instruction, the brilliant and turbulent life of ancient Hellas. There is nothing in Greek civilization that does not illuminate our own.
 * Preface, P.18

III - Caesar and Christ (1944)

 * There is no greater drama in human record than the sight of a few Christians, scorned or oppressed by a succession of emperors, bearing all trials with a fierce tenacity, multiplying quietly, building order while their enemies generated chaos, fighting the sword with the word, brutality with hope, and at last defeating the strongest state that history has known. Caesar and Christ had met in the arena, and Christ had won.
 * Chapter 30, part 1, p. 652

VI - The Reformation (1957)

 * To all Christian governments Christianity was not a rule of means but a means of rule; Christ was for the people, Machiavelli was preferred by the kings. The state in some measure had civilized man, but who would civilize the state?
 * Chapter 6, p. 229

XI - The Age of Napoleon (1975)

 * Co-written with Ariel Durant

 * Power dements even more than it corrupts, lowering the guard of foresight and raising the haste of action.
 * Ch. IV : The Convention: September 21, 1792 - October 26, 1795, Part V : The Reign of Terror: September 17, 1793 - July 28, 1794, § 4 : The Revolution Eats Its Children

Fallen Leaves (2014)

 * Fallen Leaves : Last Words on Life, Love, War and God (2014)

 * Children and fools speak the truth; and somehow they find happiness in their sincerity.
 * Ch. 1 : Our life begins

 * See him, the newborn, dirty but marvelous, ridiculous in actuality, infinite in possibility, capable of that ultimate miracle, growth.
 * Ch. 1 : Our life begins

 * Life is that which is discontent, which struggles and seeks, which suffers and creates.
 * Ch. 1 : Our life begins

 * Childhood may be defined as the age of play; therefore some children are never young, and some adults are never old.
 * Ch. 1 : Our life begins

 * Man is as young as the risks he takes.
 * Ch. 2 : On Youth

 * Happiness is the free play of the instincts, and so is youth.
 * Ch. 2 : On Youth

 * Let us ask the Gods not for possessions, but for things to do; happiness is in making things rather than consuming them.
 * Ch. 2 : On Youth

 * Youth is learning to read (which is all that one learns in school), and is learning where and how to find what he may later need to know (which is the best of the arts that he acquires in college). Nothing learned from a book is worth anything until it is used and verified in life; only then does it begin to affect behavior and desire. It is Life that educates, and perhaps love more than anything else in life.

 * It is life that educates, and perhaps love more than anything else in life.
 * Ch. 2 : On Youth

 * The principle of the family was mutual aid; but the principle of society is competition, the struggle for existence, the elimination of the weak and the survival of the strong.
 * Ch. 2 : On Youth

 * Here is a fulfillment of long centuries of civilization and culture; here, in romantic love, more than the triumph of thought or the victories of power is the topmost reach of human beings.
 * Ch. 2 : On Youth

 * Wisdom, if it were young, would cherish love, nursing it with devotion, deepening it with sacrifice, vitalizing with parentage, making all things subordinate to it till the end. Even though it consumes us in its service and overwhelms us with tragedy, even though it breaks us down with separations, let it be first. How can it matter what price we pay for love?
 * Ch. 2 : On Youth

 * Middle age begins with marriage; for then work and responsibility replace carefree play, passion surrenders to the limitations of social order, and poetry yields to prose.
 * Ch. 3 : On Middle Age

 * As we find a place in the economic world the rebellion of youth subsides; we disapprove of earthquakes when our feet are on the earth. We forget then the radicalism then in a gentle liberalism — which is radicalism softened with the consciousness of a bank account.
 * Ch. 3 : On Middle Age

 * She is a woman now, and not an idle girl, not a domestic ornament or a sexual convenience anymore.
 * On the maturation of women, Ch. 4 : On Old Age

 * A man is as old as his arteries, and as young as his ideas.
 * Ch. 4 : On Old Age

 * Here and everywhere is the struggle for existence, life inextricably enmeshed with war. All life living at the expense of life, every organism eating other organisms forever.
 * Ch. 4 : On Old Age

 * Life is that which can hold a purpose for three thousand years and never yield. The individual fails, but life succeeds. The individual is foolish, but life holds in its blood and seed the wisdom of generations. The individual dies, but life, tireless and undiscourageble, goes on, wondering, longing, planning, trying, mounting, longing.
 * Ch. 5 : On Death

 * Space, subjectively, is the coexistence of perceptions — perceiving two objects at once.
 * Ch. 6 : Our Souls

 * Time, subjectively, is the conscious sequence of perceptions.
 * Ch. 6 : Our Souls

 * By mind I mean the totality of perceptions, memories and ideas in an organism.
 * Ch. 6 : Our Souls

 * A sensation is the feeling of an external stimulus or an internal condition.
 * Ch. 6 : Our Souls

title: Will Durant


text:
James Thurber

James Grover Thurber (8 December 1894 – 2 November 1961) was an American humorist and cartoonist.

Cartoon captions

 * All right, have it your way — you heard a seal bark!
 * Cartoon caption, The New Yorker (30 January 1932); "Women and Men", The Seal in the Bedroom and Other Predicaments (1932); also used in "The Lady on the Bookcase", Alarms and Diversions (1957).

 * Le coeur a ses raisons, Mrs. Bence, que la raison ne connait pas.
 * Cartoon caption, The New Yorker (27 July 1935)
 * Borrowing from Blaise Pascal, Pensées, 1670 (published posthumously): "Le coeur a ses raisons que la raison ne connaît point" (Translation: The heart has its reasons, which reason does not know.)

 * Well, if I called the wrong number, why did you answer the phone?
 * Cartoon caption, The New Yorker (5 June 1937); "Word Dance--Part One", A Thurber Carnival (1960)

 * I love the idea of there being two sexes, don't you?
 * Cartoon caption, The New Yorker (22 April 1939); "A Miscellany", Alarms and Diversions (1957)

 * He knows all about art, but he doesn't know what he likes.
 * Cartoon caption, The New Yorker (4 November 1939). Parody of "I don't know much about art, but I know what I like."
 * Variant: He knew all about art, but he didn't know what you like.
 * "Word Dance — Part One", A Thurber Carnival (1960)

 * It's a naïve domestic Burgundy without any breeding, but I think you'll be amused by its presumption.
 * Cartoon caption (1944), in which a dinner host is speaking to his guests about the wine, reproduced in The Thurber Carnival (1945).

Fables for Our Time and Further Fables for Our Time

 * There is no safety in numbers, or in anything else.
 * "The Fairly Intelligent Fly", The New Yorker (4 February 1939), a tale of a fly who avoided getting caught in an empty spider web, but then disregarding a warning by a bee, settled down among other flies he believed to be "dancing", and "became stuck to the flypaper with all the other flies."; Fables for Our Time & Famous Poems Illustrated (1940); Quote Investigator notes that this statement was referred to as "Thurber’s Law", in 1,001 Logical Laws (1979)

 * A burden in the bush is worth two on your hands.
 * "The Hunter and the Elephant", The New Yorker (18 February 1939)

 * It is better to ask some of the questions than to know all the answers.
 * "The Scotty Who Knew Too Much", The New Yorker (18 February 1939)

 * Early to rise and early to bed makes a male healthy and wealthy and dead.
 * "The Shrike and the Chipmunks", The New Yorker (18 February 1939); Fables for Our Time & Famous Poems Illustrated (1940). Because it is derived from Benjamin Franklin's famous saying this is often misquoted as: Early to rise and early to bed makes a man healthy, wealthy, and dead.

 * You might as well fall flat on your face as lean over too far backward.
 * "The Bear Who Let It Alone", The New Yorker (29 April 1939); Fables for Our Time & Famous Poems Illustrated (1940)

 * You can fool too many of the people too much of the time.
 * "The Owl who was God", The New Yorker (29 April 1939); Fables for Our Time & Famous Poems Illustrated (1940). Parody of "You can fool all the people some of the time and some of the people all of the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time."

 * Once upon a sunny morning a man who sat in a breakfast nook looked up from his scrambled eggs to see a white unicorn with a golden horn quietly cropping the roses in the garden. The man went up to the bedroom where his wife was still asleep and woke her. "There's a unicorn in the garden," he said. "Eating roses." She opened one unfriendly eye and looked at him. "The unicorn is a mythical beast," she said, and turned her back on him. The man walked slowly downstairs and out into the garden. The unicorn was still there; he was now browsing among the tulips.
 * "The Unicorn in the Garden", The New Yorker (31 October 1939); Fables for Our Time & Famous Poems Illustrated (1940). This is a fable where a man sees a Unicorn in his garden, and his wife reports the matter to have him taken away, to the "booby-hatch". Online text with illustration by Thurber

 * Don't count your boobies until they are hatched.
 * "The Unicorn in the Garden", The New Yorker (31 October 1939); Fables for Our Time & Famous Poems Illustrated (1940)

 * He who hesitates is sometimes saved.
 * "The Glass in the Field", The New Yorker (31 October 1939); Fables for Our Time & Famous Poems Illustrated (1940). This is the moral of a fable in which several birds reject a Goldfinch's report that he ran into "crystallized air" while flying across a field, where workmen had left a large plate of glass upright. The Swallow rejects the offer to come along with others and prove the Goldfinch wrong.

 * Don't get it right, just get it written.
 * "The Sheep in Wolf's Clothing", The New Yorker (29 April 1939); Fables for Our Time & Famous Poems Illustrated (1940). The moral is ironic with respect to the fable, in which sheep do insufficient research before writing about wolves, resulting in the sheep being easy prey.

 * It is better to have loafed and lost, than never to have loafed at all.
 * "The Courtship of Arthur and Al", The New Yorker (26 August 1939); Fables for Our Time & Famous Poems Illustrated (1940). Parody of Alfred Lord Tennyson's "Better to have loved and lost/than never to have loved at all."

 * Nowadays most men lead lives of noisy desperation.
 * "The Grizzly and the Gadgets", The New Yorker (date unknown); Further Fables for Our Time (1956); This statement is derived from one of Henry David Thoreau: "The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation."

 * Love is blind, but desire just doesn't give a good goddam. [sic]
 * "The Clothes Moth and the Luna Moth", The New Yorker (date unknown); Further Fables for Our Time (1956)

 * A word to the wise is not sufficient if it doesn't make any sense.
 * "The Weaver and the Worm", The New Yorker (11 August 1956); Further Fables for Our Time (1956)

 * All men kill the thing they hate, too, unless, of course, it kills them first.
 * "The Crow and the Scarecrow", The New Yorker (date unknown); Further Fables for Our Time (1956). This is derived from Oscar Wilde's statement "All men kill the thing they love..."

 * All men should strive to learn before they die what they are running from, and to, and why.
 * "The Shore and the Sea", Further Fables for Our Time (first publication, 1956)

 * Moral: Where most of us end up there is no knowing, but the hellbent get where they are going.
 * "The Wolf Who Went Places", The New Yorker, Page 28 (19 May 1956); Further Fables for Our Time (1956)

From other fiction

 * The pounding of the cylinders increased: ta-pocketa-pocketa-pocketa-pocketa-pocketa.
 * The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (1942)

 * "To hell with the handkerchief," said Walter Mitty scornfully. He took one last drag on his cigarette and snapped it away. Then, with that faint, fleeting smile playing about his lips, he faced the firing squad; erect and motionless, proud and disdainful, Walter Mitty the Undefeated, inscrutable to the last.
 * The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (1942)

 * "Who are you?" the minstrel asked. "I am the Golux," said the Golux, proudly, "the only Golux in the world, and not a mere Device."
 * The Thirteen Clocks (1951) page 32

From Lanterns and Lances

 * Every time is a time for comedy in a world of tension that would languish without it. But I cannot confine myself to lightness in a period of human life that demands light ... We all know that, as the old adage has it, "It is later than you think." ..., but I also say occasionally: "It is lighter than you think." In this light let's not look back in anger, or forward in fear, but around in awareness.
 * "Foreword", Lanterns & Lances (1961)

 * Precision of communication is important, more important than ever, in our era of hair trigger balances, when a false or misunderstood word may create as much disaster as a sudden thoughtless act.
 * Lanterns and Lances (1961), p. 44

 * There are two kinds of light — the glow that illumines, and the glare that obscures.
 * Lanterns and Lances (1961), p. 146; also misquoted as "There are two kinds of light — the glow that illuminates, and the glare that obscures."

 * Boys are perhaps beyond the range of anybody's sure understanding, at least when they are between the ages of eighteen months and ninety years.
 * "The Darlings at the Top of the Stairs", Lanterns & Lances (1961); previously appeared in The Queen and in Harper's Magazine.

 * A pinch of probability is worth a pound of perhaps.
 * note for "a future fable", "Such a Phrase as Drifts Through Dreams", Holiday Magazine; reprinted in Lanterns & Lances (1961).

 * Now I am not a cat man, but a dog man, and all felines can tell this at a glance — a sharp, vindictive glance.
 * "My Senegalese Birds and Siamese Cats", Holiday Magazine; reprinted in Lanterns & Lances (1961).

 * Man has gone long enough, or even too long, without being man enough to face the simple truth that the trouble with Man is Man.
 * "The Trouble with Man is Man", The New Yorker; reprinted in Lanterns & Lances (1961).

 * The only rules comedy can tolerate are those of taste, and the only limitations those of libel.
 * "The Duchess and the Bugs", Lanterns & Lances (1961). The piece was "a response" to an award Thurber received from the Ohioana Library Association in 1953.

 * Discussion in America means dissent.
 * "The Duchess and the Bugs", Lanterns & Lances (1961).

 * Somebody has said that woman's place is in the wrong. That's fine. What the wrong needs is a woman's presence and a woman's touch. She is far better equipped than men to set it right.
 * "The Duchess and the Bugs", Lanterns & Lances (1961).

 * If I have sometimes seemed to make fun of Woman, I assure you it has only been for the purpose of egging her on.
 * "The Duchess and the Bugs", Lanterns & Lances (1961).

 * Humor and pathos, tears and laughter are, in the highest expression of human character and achievement, inseparable.
 * "The Case for Comedy", Lanterns & Lances (1961); previously appeared in The Atlantic Monthly November 1960

 * It is true, I confess, that if a male character of my invention started across the stage to disrobe a virgin criminally (ah, euphemism to end euphemisms!), he would probably catch his foot in the piano stool and end up playing "Button Up Your Overcoat" on the black keys.
 * "The Case for Comedy", Lanterns & Lances (1961).

From other writings

 * She came naturally by her confused and groundless fears, for her own mother lived the latter years of her life in the horrible suspicion that electricity was dripping invisibly all over the house.
 * My Life and Hard Times (1933) page 33, Harper & Row, New York.

 * In order to be eligible to play it was necessary for him to keep up in his studies, a very difficult matter, for while he was not dumber than an ox he was not any smarter.
 * My Life And Hard Times, referring to a fellow Ohio State student and football star.

 * I do not have a psychiatrist and I do not want one, for the simple reason that if he listened to me long enough, he might become disturbed.
 * "Carpe Noctem, If You Can", Credos and Curios (1962)

 * The dog has got more fun out of Man than Man has got out of the dog, for the clearly demonstrable reason that Man is the more laughable of the two animals.
 * "An Introduction", The Fireside Book of Dog Stories (Simon and Schuster, 1943); reprinted in Thurber's Dogs (1955)

 * The dog has seldom been successful in pulling Man up to its level of sagacity, but Man has frequently dragged the dog down to his.
 * "An Introduction", The Fireside Book of Dog Stories (Simon and Schuster, 1943); reprinted in Thurber's Dogs (1955)

 * I am not a dog lover. A dog lover to me means a dog that is in love with another dog.
 * "I Like Dogs", For Men (April 1939); reprinted in People Have More Fun Than Anybody (1994); slightly paraphrased in "And So to Medve", Thurber's Dogs (1955)

 * He picked out this sentence in a New Yorker casual of mine: "After dinner, the men moved into the living room," and he wanted to know why I, or the editors, had put in the comma. I could explain that one all right. I wrote back that this particular comma was Ross's way of giving the men time to push back their chairs and stand up.
 * The Years with Ross (Little Brown & Co, 1957, pg.267)
 * Variant: From one casual of mine he picked this sentence. “After dinner, the men moved into the living room.” I explained to the professor that this was Ross’s way of giving the men time to push back their chairs and stand up. There must, as we know, be a comma after every move, made by men, on this earth.
 * Memo to The New Yorker (1959); reprinted in New York Times Book Review (4 December 1988); Harold Ross was the editor of The New Yorker from its inception until 1951, and well-known for the overuse of commas

 * From now on, I think it is safe to predict, neither the Democratic nor the Republican Party will ever nominate for President a candidate without good looks, stage presence, theatrical delivery, and a sense of timing.
 * said of the Kennedy-Nixon TV debates in an unpublished manuscript, (dated 20 March 1961); Collecting Himself (1989).

 * A drawing is always dragged down to the level of its caption.
 * The New Yorker (2 August 1930)

 * But those rare souls whose spirit gets magically into the hearts of men, leave behind them something more real and warmly personal than bodily presence, an ineffable and eternal thing. It is everlasting life touching us as something more than a vague, recondite concept. The sound of a great name dies like an echo; the splendor of fame fades into nothing; but the grace of a fine spirit pervades the places through which it has passed, like the haunting loveliness of mignonette.
 * “The Book-End,” Columbus Dispatch (1923) Collecting Himself (1989).

 * Sophistication might be described as the ability to cope gracefully with a situation involving the presence of a formidable menace to one's poise and prestige (such as the butler, or the man under the bed — but never the husband).
 * The New Yorker (2 August 1930), discussing cartooning

 * Speed is scarcely the noblest virtue of graphic composition, but it has its curious rewards. There is a sense of getting somewhere fast, which satisfies a native American urge.
 * Preface to A Thurber Garland (1955)

 * Women are wiser than men, because they know less and understand more.
 * Quoted in: Kabir, Hajara Muhammad (2010). Northern women development. [Nigeria]. ISBN 978-978-906-469-4. OCLC 890820657.
 *

Letters and interviews

 * Comedy has to be done en clair. You can't blunt the edge of wit or the point of satire with obscurity. Try to imagine a famous witty saying that is not immediately clear.
 * Letter, March 11, 1954, to Malcolm Cowley. Collecting Himself (1989)

 * With 60 staring me in the face, I have developed inflammation of the sentence structure and a definite hardening of the paragraphs.
 * Quoted in New York Post (30 June 1955)

 * The laughter of man is more terrible than his tears, and takes more forms — hollow, heartless, mirthless, maniacal.
 * New York Times Magazine (7 December 1958).

 * I always begin at the left with the opening word of the sentence and read toward the right and I recommend this method.
 * Memo to The New Yorker (1959); reprinted in New York Times Book Review (4 December 1988)

 * When all things are equal, translucence in writing is more effective than transparency, just as glow is more revealing than glare.
 * Memo to The New Yorker (1959); reprinted in New York Times Book Review (4 December 1988)

 * Editing should be, especially in the case of old writers, a counseling rather than a collaborating task. The tendency of the writer-editor to collaborate is natural, but he should say to himself, "How can I help this writer to say it better in his own style?" and avoid "How can I show him how I would write it, if it were my piece?"
 * Memo to The New Yorker (1959); reprinted in New York Times Book Review (4 December 1988)

 * The wit makes fun of other persons; the satirist makes fun of the world; the humorist makes fun of himself, but in so doing, he identifies himself with people — that is, people everywhere, not for the purpose of taking them apart, but simply revealing their true nature.
 * Television interview with Edward R. Murrow on TV show Small World, CBS-TV (25 March 1959); transcript published in New York Post

 * We all know that the theater and every play that comes to Broadway have within themselves, like the human being, the seed of self-destruction and the certainty of death. The thing is to see how long the theater, the play, and the human being can last in spite of themselves.
 * Quoted in New York Times (21 February 1960).

 * If a playwright tried to see eye to eye with everybody, he would get the worst case of strabismus since Hannibal lost an eye trying to count his nineteen elephants during a snowstorm while crossing the Alps.
 * Quoted in The New York Times (21 February 1960)

 * Humor is emotional chaos remembered in tranquility.
 * Quoted in New York Post (29 February 1960)

 * My drawings have been described as pre-intentionalist, meaning that they were finished before the ideas for them had occurred to me. I shall not argue the point.
 * Interview, Life Magazine (New York, March 14, 1960).

 * I’m 65 and I guess that puts me in with the geriatrics. But if there were fifteen months in every year, I’d only be 48. That’s the trouble with us. We number everything. Take women, for example. I think they deserve to have more than twelve years between the ages of 28 and 40.
 * Quoted from an an interview with Glenna Syse in Time Magazine (New York, 15 August 1960); Time's editors corrected Thurber's arithmetic

 * One (martini) is all right, two is too many, three is not enough.
 * Quoted in Time Magazine (New York, 15 August 1960) from an an interview with Glenna Syse of the Chicago Sun-Times

 * My opposition lies in the fact that offhand answers have little value or grace of expression, and that such oral give and take helps to perpetuate the decline of the English language.
 * Letter to Henry Brandon after an interview with him, explaining his opposition to interviews; quoted by Brandon in As We Are (1961)

 * The difference between our decadence and the Russians is that while theirs is brutal, ours is apathetic.
 * Quoted in The Observer (London, 5 February 1961).

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

title: James Thurber


text:
Denis Diderot

Denis Diderot (5 October 1713 – 31 July 1784) was a French philosopher and chief editor of the historic project to produce L'Encyclopédie.

Quotes

 * From fanaticism to barbarism is only one step.
 * Essai sur le Mérite de la Vertu (1745); a translation and adaptation of Inquiry concerning Virtue or Merit (1699) by Anthony Ashley-Cooper, 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury

 * If you want me to believe in God, you must make me touch him.
 * Portraying a fictional conversation of Nicholas Saunderson with a priest, in ' Lettre sur les aveugles [Letter about the Blind] (1749), as quoted in Diderot and the Encyclopædists (1897) by John Morley, p. 92. Publication of this work resulted in Diderot being arrested and imprisoned.

 * What is this world? A complex whole, subject to endless revolutions. All these revolutions show a continual tendency to destruction; a swift succession of beings who follow one another, press forward, and vanish; a fleeting symmetry; the order of a moment. I reproached you just now with estimating the perfection of things by your own capacity; and I might accuse you here of measuring its duration by the length of your own days. You judge of the continuous existence of the world, as an ephemeral insect might judge of yours. The world is eternal for you, as you are eternal to the being that lives but for one instant. Yet the insect is the more reasonable of the two. For what a prodigious succession of ephemeral generations attests your eternity! What an immeasurable tradition! Yet shall we all pass away, without the possibility of assigning either the real extension that we filled in space, or the precise time that we shall have endured. Time, matter, space — all, it may be, are no more than a point.
 * Dying words of Nicholas Saunderson as portrayed in Lettre sur les aveugles [Letter on the Blind] (1749)
 * Variant translation:
 * What is this world of ours? A complex entity subject to sudden changes which all indicate a tendency to destruction; a swift succession of beings which follow one another, assert themselves and disappear; a fleeting symmetry; a momentary order.

 * As to all the outward signs that awaken within us feelings of sympathy and compassion, the blind are only affected by crying; I suspect them in general of lacking humanity. What difference is there for a blind man, between a man who is urinating, and man who, without crying out, is bleeding? And we ourselves, do we not cease to commiserate, when the distance or the smallness of the objects in question produce the same effect on us as the lack of sight produces in the blind man? All our virtues depend on the faculty of the senses, and on the degree to which external things affect us. Thus I do not doubt that, except for the fear of punishment, many people would not feel any remorse for killing a man from a distance at which he appeared no larger than a swallow. No more, at any rate, than they would for slaughtering a cow up close. If we feel compassion for a horse that suffers, but if we squash an ant without any scruple, isn’t the same principle at work?
 * Lettre sur les aveugles [Letter on the Blind] (1749)

 * When one compares the talents one has with those of a Leibniz, one is tempted to throw away one's books and go die quietly in the dark of some forgotten corner.
 * Oeuvres complètes, vol. 7, p. 678

 * Only a very bad theologian would confuse the certainty that follows revelation with the truths that are revealed. They are entirely different things.
 * Apology for the Abbé de Prades (1752)

 * Il y a un peu de testicule au fond de nos sentiments les plus sublimes et de notre tendresse la plus épurée.
 * There's a bit of testicle at the bottom of our most sublime feelings and our purest tenderness.
 * Letter to Étienne Noël Damilaville (1760-11-03)

 * There is no kind of harassment that a man may not inflict on a woman with impunity in civilized societies.
 * "On Women" (1772), as translated in Selected Writings (1966) edited by Lester G. Crocker

 * Impenetrable in their dissimulation, cruel in their vengeance, tenacious in their purposes, unscrupulous as to their methods, animated by profound and hidden hatred for the tyranny of man — it is as though there exists among them an ever-present conspiracy toward domination, a sort of alliance like that subsisting among the priests of every country.
 * "On Women" (1772), as translated in Selected Writings (1966) edited by Lester G. Crocker

 * The arbitrary rule of a just and enlightened prince is always bad. His virtues are the most dangerous and the surest form of seduction: they lull a people imperceptibly into the habit of loving, respecting, and serving his successor, whoever that successor may be, no matter how wicked or stupid.
 * "Refutation of Helvétius" (written 1773-76, published 1875)

 * L'esprit de l'escalier
 * "Spirit of the staircase" or "Staircase inspiration"
 * This phrase is a famous allusion to the witty remarks one thinks of when it is too late, as when one is leaving a meeting and going down the stairs. Paradoxe sur le Comédien (1773-1777)

 * It has been said that love robs those who have it of their wit, and gives it to those who have none.
 * Paradoxe sur le Comédien (1773-1777)

 * Man was born to live with his fellow human beings. Separate him, isolate him, his character will go bad, a thousand ridiculous affects will invade his heart, extravagant thoughts will germinate in his brain, like thorns in an uncultivated land.
 * The character Suzanne Simon, in La Religieuse [The Nun] (1796)

 * As for our celebrated lawgivers, who have cast us in our present awkward mold, you may be sure that they have acted to serve their interests and not ours. Witness all our political, civil, and religious institutions — examine them thoroughly: unless I am very much mistaken, you will see how, through the ages, the human race has been broken to the halter that a handful of rascals were itching to impose. Watch out for the fellow who talks about putting things in order! Putting things in order always means getting other people under your control.
 * "Supplement to Bougainville's Voyage" (1796)
 * Variant translation:
 * Never allow yourselves to forget that it is for their own sakes and not for yours that all those wise lawgivers have forced you into your present unnatural and rigid molds. And as evidence of this, I need only produce all our political, civil, and religious institutions. Examine them thoroughly, and either I am very much mistaken or you will find that mankind has been forced to bow, century after century, beneath a mere handful of scoundrels has conspired, in ever age, to impose upon it. Beware of the man who wants to set things in order. Setting things in order always involves acquiring mastery over others — by tying them hand and foot.
 * As translated by Derek Coleman, in Diderot's Selected Writings (1966)

 * The wisest among us is very lucky never to have met the woman, be she beautiful or ugly, intelligent or stupid, who could drive him crazy enough to be fit to be put into an asylum.
 * Ceci n’est pas un conte [This Is No Tale] (1796),

 * How old the world is! I walk between two eternities... What is my fleeting existence in comparison with that decaying rock, that valley digging its channel ever deeper, that forest that is tottering and those great masses above my head about to fall? I see the marble of tombs crumbling into dust; and yet I don’t want to die!
 * Salon of 1767 (1798), Oeuvres esthétiques

 * I have often seen an actor laugh off the stage, but I don’t remember ever having seen one weep.
 * "Paradox on Acting" (1830), as quoted in Selected Writings (1966) edited by Lester G. Crocker

 * Justice is the first virtue of those who command, and stops the complaints of those who obey.
 * As quoted in The Golden Treasury of Thought : A Gathering of Quotations from the Best Ancient and Modern Authors (1873) by Theodore Taylor, p. 227

 * Et ses mains ourdiraient les entrailles du prêtre, Au défaut d’un cordon pour étrangler les rois.
 * And his hands would plait the priest's entrails, For want of a rope, to strangle kings.
 * "Les Éleuthéromanes", in Poésies Diverses (1875)
 * Variant translation: His hands would plait the priest's guts, if he had no rope, to strangle kings.
 * This derives from the prior statement widely attributed to Jean Meslier: "I would like — and this would be the last and most ardent of my wishes — I would like the last of the kings to be strangled by the guts of the last priest". It is often claimed the passage appears in Meslier's Testament (1725), but it appears only in abstracts of the work written by others. See the Wikipedia article Jean Meslier for details.
 * Variant: Et des boyaux du dernier prêtre Serrons le cou du dernier roi.
 * Let us strangle the last king with the guts of the last priest.
 * Attributed to Diderot by Jean-François de La Harpe in Cours de Littérature Ancienne et Moderne (1840)
 * Attributions to Diderot of similar statements also occur in various forms, i.e.: "Men will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest."

 * The more man ascends through the past, and the more he launches into the future, the greater he will be, and all these philosophers and ministers and truth-telling men who have fallen victims to the stupidity of nations, the atrocities of priests, the fury of tyrants, what consolation was left for them in death? This: That prejudice would pass, and that posterity would pour out the vial of ignominy upon their enemies. O Posterity! Holy and sacred stay of the unhappy and the oppressed; thou who art just, thou who art incorruptible, thou who findest the good man, who unmaskest the hypocrite, who breakest down the tyrant, may thy sure faith, thy consoling faith never, never abandon me!
 * As quoted in "Diderot" in The Great Infidels (1881) by Robert Green Ingersoll; The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll Vol. III (1900), p. 367

 * Pithy sentences are like sharp nails which force truth upon our memory.
 * As quoted in A Dictionary of Thoughts : Being a Cyclopedia of Laconic Quotations (1908) by Tryon Edwards, p. 338

 * The best doctor is the one you run for and can't find.
 * As quoted in Selected Thoughts from the French: XV Century - XX Century, with English Translations (1913) by James Raymond Solly, p. 67

 * [Africans are] always vicious... mostly inclined to lasciviousness, vengeance, theft and lies.
 * As quoted in David Johnson, 'Representing the Cape "Hottentots", from the French Enlightenment to Post-Apartheid South Africa', Eighteenth-Century Studies, 40.4 (Summer 2007), 525-52. https://www.jstor.org/stable/30053727.

 * Distance is a great promoter of admiration!
 * As quoted in Thesaurus of Epigrams: A New Classified Collection of Witty Remarks, Bon Mots and Toasts (1942) by Edmund Fuller

 * We are far more liable to catch the vices than the virtues of our associates.
 * As quoted in Thesaurus of Epigrams: A New Classified Collection of Witty Remarks, Bon Mots and Toasts (1942) by Edmund Fuller

 * Evil always turns up in this world through some genius or other.
 * As quoted in Dictionary of Foreign Quotations (1980) by Mary Collison, Robert L. Collison, p. 98

 * There is no moral precept that does not have something inconvenient about it.
 * As quoted in Dictionary of Foreign Quotations (1980) by Mary Collison, Robert L. Collison, p. 235

 * I am beginning to feel that I am growing old; soon, I shall have to eat mush like children. I shall no longer be able to speak, which will be a rather great advantage for others and but a small inconvenience for myself.... The time in which I count in years is gone; that in which I count in days is here.... I had thought that the fibers of the heart would grow callous with age, it's not at all the case. I am not sure that my sensitivity hasn't increased; everything moves me, affects me.... To fade out between a man feeling your pulse and another bothering your head; not to know where one comes from, why one came, where one is going ...
 * Letter to his sister Denise, as quoted in Diderot, Reason and Resonance (1982) by Élisabeth de Fontenay, pp. 270–271

 * I believe in God, although I live very happily with atheists... It is very important not to mistake hemlock for parsley; but not at all so to believe or not in God.
 * As quoted in Against the Faith (1985) by Jim Herrick, p. 75
 * Variant translation: It is very important not to mistake hemlock for parsley, but to believe or not believe in God is not important at all.

 * There are things I can't force. I must adjust. There are times when the greatest change needed is a change of my viewpoint.
 * As quoted in Cracking the Code of Our Physical Universe : The Key to a Whole New World of Enlightenment and Enrichment (2006) by Matthew M Radmanesh, p. 91

 * Happiest are the people who give most happiness to others.
 * As quoted in Happyology by Harald W. Tietze, p. 28

 * [Jews are] angry and brutish people, vile and vulgar men, slaves worthy of the yoke [Talmudism] which you bear... Go, take back your books and remove yourselves from me. [ The Talmud ] taught the Jews to steal the goods of Christians, to regard them as savage beasts, to push them over the precipice... to kill them with impunity and to utter every morning the most horrible imprecations against them.
 * See The Jews: A History, Second Edition, by John Efron, Steven Weitzman and Matthias Lehmann

Pensées Philosophiques (1746)

 * Philosophical Thoughts (1746)

 * When superstition is allowed to perform the task of old age in dulling the human temperament, we can say goodbye to all excellence in poetry, in painting, and in music.
 * Ch. 3, as quoted in Selected Writings (1966) edited by Lester G. Crocker

 * To attempt the destruction of our passions is the height of folly. What a noble aim is that of the zealot who tortures himself like a madman in order to desire nothing, love nothing, feel nothing, and who, if he succeeded, would end up a complete monster!
 * Ch. 5, as quoted in Selected Writings (1966) edited by Lester G. Crocker

 * The God of the Christians is a father who makes much of his apples, and very little of his children.
 * No. 16

 * On doit exiger de moi que je cherche la vérité, mais non que je la trouve.
 * One may demand of me that I should seek truth, but not that I should find it.
 * No. 29; Variant translation: I can be expected to look for truth but not to find it.

 * There is no good father who would want to resemble our Heavenly Father
 * No. 51

 * We are constantly railing against the passions; we ascribe to them all of man’s afflictions, and we forget that they are also the source of all his pleasures … But what provokes me is that only their adverse side is considered … and yet only passions, and great passions, can raise the soul to great things. Without them there is no sublimity, either in morals or in creativity. Art returns to infancy, and virtue becomes small-minded.
 * As translated in Diderot (1977) by Otis Fellows, p. 39
 * Variant translations:
 * One declaims endlessly against the passions; one imputes all of man's suffering to them. One forgets that they are also the source of all his pleasures.
 * Only passions, great passions, can elevate the soul to great things.

 * Superstition is more injurious to God than atheism.

 * Scepticism is the first step towards truth.
 * Variant: A thing is not proved just because no one has ever questioned it. What has never been gone into impartially has never been properly gone into. Hence skepticism is the first step toward truth. It must be applied generally, because it is the touchstone.
 * As quoted in The Anchor Book of French Quotations with English Translations (1963) by Norbert Gutermam
 * Variant: The first step towards philosophy is incredulity.

 * To prove the Gospels by a miracle is to prove an absurdity by something contrary to nature.
 * As quoted in The Anchor Book of French Quotations with English Translations (1963) by Norbert Gutermam

 * To say that man is a compound of strength and weakness, light and darkness, smallness and greatness, is not to indict him, it is to define him.
 * As quoted in The Anchor Book of French Quotations with English Translations (1963) by Norbert Gutermam

 * We do not know nature; causes hidden in her breast might have produced everything. In your turn, observe the polyp of Trembley: does it not contain in itself the causes which bring about regeneration? Why then would it be absurd to think that there are physical causes by reason of which everything has been made, and to which the whole chain of this vast universe is so necessarily bound and held that, nothing which happens, could have failed to happen,—causes, of which we are so invincibly ignorant that we have had recourse to a God, who, as some aver, is not so much as a logical entity? Thus to destroy chance is not to prove the existence of a supreme being, since there may be some other thing which is neither chance nor God—I mean, nature. It follows that the study of nature can make only unbelievers; and the way of thinking of all its more successful investigators proves this.
 * As quoted by Julien Offray de La Mettrie, Man a Machine (1747) Tr. Gertrude Carman Bussey (1912)

L'Encyclopédie (1751-1766)

 * First published 1751-1766, revised in 1772, 1777 and 1780

 * This is a work that cannot be completed except by a society of men of letters and skilled workmen, each working separately on his own part, but all bound together solely by their zeal for the best interests of the human race and a feeling of mutual good will.
 * Article on Encyclopedia, as translated in The Many Faces of Philosophy : Reflections from Plato to Arendt (2001), "Diderot", p. 237

 * Aucun homme n'a recu de la nature le droit de commander aux autres. La liberté est un présent du ciel, et chaque individu de la meme espèce a le droit d'en jouir aussitòt qu'il jouit de la raison.
 * No man has received from nature the right to give orders to others. Freedom is a gift from heaven, and every individual of the same species has the right to enjoy it as soon as he is in enjoyment of his reason.
 * Article on Political Authority, Vol. 1, (1751) as quoted in Selected Writings (1966) edited by Lester G. Crocker
 * Variant translation: No man has received from nature the right to command his fellow human beings.

 * La puissance qui s'acquiert par la violence n'est qu'une usurpation, et ne dure qu'autant que la force de celui qui commande l'emporte sur celle de ceux qui obéissent.
 * Power acquired by violence is only a usurpation, and lasts only as long as the force of him who commands prevails over that of those who obey.
 * Article on Political Authority, Vol. 1 (1751)

 * The good of the people must be the great purpose of government. By the laws of nature and of reason, the governors are invested with power to that end. And the greatest good of the people is liberty. It is to the state what health is to the individual.
 * Article on Government

 * Reason is to the philosopher what grace is to the Christian. Grace causes the Christian to act, reason the philosopher. Other men are carried away by their passions, their actions not being preceded by reflection: these are the men who walk in darkness. On the other hand, the philosopher, even in his passions, acts only after reflection; he walks in the dark, but by a torch. The philosopher forms his principles from an infinity of particular observations. Most people adopt principles without thinking of the observations that have produced them, they believe the maxims exist, so to speak, by themselves. But the philosopher takes maxims from their source; he examines their origin; he knows their proper value, and he makes use of them only in so far as they suit him. Truth is not for the philosopher a mistress who corrupts his imagination and whom he believes to be found everywhere; he contents himself with being able to unravel it where he can perceive it. He does not confound it with probability; he takes for true what is true, for false what is false, for doubtful what is doubtful, and probable what is only probable. He does more, and here you have a great perfection of the philosopher: when he has no reason by which to judge, he knows how to live in suspension of judgment... The philosophical spirit is, then, a spirit of observation and exactness, which relates everything to true principles...
 * Article on Philosophy, Vol. 25, p. 667, as quoted in Main Currents of Western Thought : Readings in Western European Intellectual History from the Middle Ages to the Present (1978) by Franklin Le Van Baumer
 * Variant translation: Reason is to the philosopher what grace is to the Christian. Grace moves the Christian to act, reason moves the philosopher. Other men walk in darkness; the philosopher, who has the same passions, acts only after reflection; he walks through the night, but it is preceded by a torch. The philosopher forms his principles on an infinity of particular observations. … He does not confuse truth with plausibility; he takes for truth what is true, for forgery what is false, for doubtful what is doubtful, and probable what is probable. … The philosophical spirit is thus a spirit of observation and accuracy.

 * Go further, and require each of them to make a contribution: you will see how many things are still missing, and you will be obliged to get the assistance of a large number of men who belong to different classes, priceless men, but to whom the gates of the academies are nonetheless closed because of their social station. All the members of these learned societies are more than is needed for a single object of human science; all the societies together are not sufficient for a science of man in general.
 * Article on Encyclopedia

 * The purpose of an encyclopedia is to collect knowledge disseminated around the globe; to set forth its general system to the men with whom we live, and transmit it to those who will come after us, so that the work of preceding centuries will not become useless to the centuries to come; and so that our offspring, becoming better instructed, will at the same time become more virtuous and happy, and that we should not die without having rendered a service to the human race in the future years to come
 * Encyclopédie (Diderot 1755 pp 365 - 48A)

 * If exclusive privileges were not granted, and if the financial system would not tend to concentrate wealth, there would be few great fortunes and no quick wealth. When the means of growing rich is divided between a greater number of citizens, wealth will also be more evenly distributed; extreme poverty and extreme wealth would be also rare.
 * Article on Wealth

On the Interpretation of Nature (1753)

 * As translated in Selected Writings (1966) edited by Lester G. Crocker

 * Are we not madder than those first inhabitants of the plain of Sennar? We know that the distance separating the earth from the sky is infinite, and yet we do not stop building our tower.
 * No. 4

 * There are three principal means of acquiring knowledge available to us: observation of nature, reflection, and experimentation. Observation collects facts; reflection combines them; experimentation verifies the result of that combination. Our observation of nature must be diligent, our reflection profound, and our experiments exact. We rarely see these three means combined; and for this reason, creative geniuses are not common.
 * No. 15

 * In order to shake a hypothesis, it is sometimes not necessary to do anything more than push it as far as it will go.
 * No. 50

 * The following general definition of an animal: a system of different organic molecules that have combined with one another, under the impulsion of a sensation similar to an obtuse and muffled sense of touch given to them by the creator of matter as a whole, until each one of them has found the most suitable position for it shape and comfort.
 * No. 51

On Dramatic Poetry (1758)

 * "On Dramatic Poetry" (1758), as quoted in Selected Writings (1966) edited by Lester G. Crocker

 * The pit of a theatre is the one place where the tears of virtuous and wicked men alike are mingled.

 * Genius is present in every age, but the men carrying it within them remain benumbed unless extraordinary events occur to heat up and melt the mass so that it flows forth.

 * It is not human nature we should accuse but the despicable conventions that pervert it.

 * Poetry must have something in it that is barbaric, vast and wild.

 * When shall we see poets born? After a time of disasters and great misfortunes, when harrowed nations begin to breathe again. And then, shaken by the terror of such spectacles, imaginations will paint things entirely strange to those who have not witnessed them.

 * Shakespeare’s fault is not the greatest into which a poet may fall. It merely indicates a deficiency of taste.

Rameau's Nephew (1762)

 * Le Neveu de Rameau (written 1762, published 1821)

 * Every man has his dignity. I'm willing to forget mine, but at my own discretion and not when someone else tells me to.

 * If there is one realm in which it is essential to be sublime, it is in wickedness. You spit on a petty thief, but you can’t deny a kind of respect for the great criminal.

 * Bad company is as instructive as licentiousness. One makes up for the loss of one’s innocence with the loss of one’s prejudices.

 * People praise virtue, but they hate it, they run away from it. It freezes you to death, and in this world you've got to keep your feet warm.

 * Je m’entretiens avec moi-même de politique, d’amour, de goût ou de philosophie ; j’abandonne mon esprit à tout son libertinage ; je le laisse maître de suivre la première idée sage ou folle qui se présente … Mes pensées ce sont mes catins.
 * I discuss with myself questions of politics, love, taste, or philosophy. I let my mind rove wantonly, give it free rein to follow any idea, wise or mad that may present itself. … My ideas are my harlots.
 * Variant translations:
 * My ideas are my whores.
 * My thoughts are my trollops.

 * La reconnaissance est un fardeau, et tout fardeau est fait pour être secoué.
 * Gratitude is a burden, and every burden is made to be shaken off.

 * We swallow greedily any lie that flatters us, but we sip only little by little at a truth we find bitter.

 * If your little savage were left to himself and be allowed to retain all his ignorance, he would in time join the infant’s reasoning to the grown man’s passion, he would strangle his father and sleep with his mother.

 * What a hell of an economic system! Some are replete with everything while others, whose stomachs are no less demanding, whose hunger is just as recurrent, have nothing to bite on. The worst of it is the constrained posture need puts you in. The needy man does not walk like the rest; he skips, slithers, twists, crawls.

D’Alembert’s Dream (1769)

 * D’Alembert’s Dream (written 1769, published 1830)

 * All abstract sciences are nothing but the study of relations between signs.
 * Dr. Théophile de Bordeu, in “Conversation Between D’Alembert and Diderot”

 * We are all instruments endowed with feeling and memory. Our senses are so many strings that are struck by surrounding objects and that also frequently strike themselves.
 * “Conversation Between D’Alembert and Diderot”

 * Do you see this egg? With this you can topple every theological theory, every church or temple in the world. What is it, this egg, before the seed is introduced into it? An insentient mass. And after the seed has been introduced to into it? What is it then? An insentient mass. For what is the seed itself other than a crude and inanimate fluid? How is this mass to make a transition to a different structure, to sentience, to life? Through heat. And what will produce that heat in it? Motion.
 * “Conversation Between D’Alembert and Diderot”, as quoted in Selected Writings (1966) edited by Lester G. Crocker, and The Enlightenment and the Intellectual Foundations of Modern Culture (2004) by Louis K Dupré, p. 30
 * Variant translation: See this egg. It is with this that all the schools of theology and all the temples of the earth are to be overturned.
 * As quoted in Diderot, Reason and Resonance (1982) by Élisabeth de Fontenay, p. 217

Addition aux Pensées philosophiques (1770)

 * Égaré dans une forêt immense pendant la nuit, je n’ai qu’une petite lumière pour me conduire. Survient un inconnu qui me dit : Mon ami, souffle ta bougie pour mieux trouver ton chemin. Cet inconnu est un théologien. — No VIII
 * Wandering in a vast forest at night, I have only a faint light to guide me. A stranger appears and says to me: "My friend, you should blow out your candle in order to find your way more clearly." This stranger is a theologian. — Number VIII

Observations on the Drawing Up of Laws (1774)

 * A letter to Catherine the Great (1774), published in 1921, as translated in Selected Writings (1966) edited by Lester G. Crocker

 * Disturbances in society are never more fearful than when those who are stirring up the trouble can use the pretext of religion to mask their true designs.

 * [L]e philosophe n'a jamais tué de prêtres et le prêtre a tué beaucoup de philosophes...
 * The philosopher has never killed any priests, whereas the priest has killed a great many philosophers.

 * In any country where talent and virtue produce no advancement, money will be the national god. Its inhabitants will either have to possess money or make others believe that they do. Wealth will be the highest virtue, poverty the greatest vice. Those who have money will display it in every imaginable way. If their ostentation does not exceed their fortune, all will be well. But if their ostentation does exceed their fortune they will ruin themselves. In such a country, the greatest fortunes will vanish in the twinkling of an eye. Those who don't have money will ruin themselves with vain efforts to conceal their poverty. That is one kind of affluence: the outward sign of wealth for a small number, the mask of poverty for the majority, and a source of corruption for all.

 * Morals are in all countries the result of legislation and government; they are not African or Asian or European: they are good or bad.

 * Patriotism is an ephemeral motive that scarcely ever outlasts the particular threat to society that aroused it.

 * The possibility of divorce renders both marriage partners stricter in their observance of the duties they owe to each other. Divorces help to improve morals and to increase the population.

 * The general interest of the masses might take the place of the insight of genius if it were allowed freedom of action.

 * The decisions of law courts should never be printed: in the long run, they form a counterauthority to the law.

Conversations with a Christian Lady (1774)

 * Conversations with a Christian Lady (Written in 1774, published 1777), as translated in Selected Writings (1966) edited by Lester G. Crocker

 * The blood of Jesus Christ can cover a multitude of sins, it seems to me.

 * The most dangerous madmen are those created by religion, and … people whose aim is to disrupt society always know how to make good use of them on occasion.

 * There is not a Musselman alive who would not imagine that he was performing an action pleasing to God and his Holy Prophet by exterminating every Christian on earth, while the Christians are scarcely more tolerant on their side.

Jacques le Fataliste (1796)

 * Jacques le Fataliste [Jacques the Fatalist] (1796)

 * Jacques said that his master said that everything good or evil we encounter here below was written on high.
 * Prologue

 * How did they meet? By chance, like everybody … Where did they come from? From the nearest place. Where were they going? Do we know where we are going?
 * Prologue

 * How easy it is to tell tales!

 * The first promise exchanged by two beings of flesh was at the foot of a rock that was crumbling into dust; they took as witness for their constancy a sky that is not the same for a single instant; everything changed in them and around them, and they believed their hearts free of vicissitudes. O children! always children!

Elements of Physiology (1875)

 * Elements of Physiology (written 1774-1780, published 1875)

 * Gaiety — a quality of ordinary men. Genius always presupposes some disorder in the machine.
 * “Diseases"

 * Good music is very close to primitive language.
 * "Correspondence of Ideas with the Motion of Organs"

 * The infant runs toward it with its eyes closed, the adult is stationary, the old man approaches it with his back turned.
 * "Death"

 * It is said that desire is a product of the will, but the converse is in fact true: will is a product of desire.
 * "Will, Freedom”

 * There is only one passion, the passion for happiness.
 * "Will, Freedom”

 * The world is the house of the strong. I shall not know until the end what I have lost or won in this place, in this vast gambling den where I have spent more than sixty years, dicebox in hand, shaking the dice.
 * Conclusion

Misattributed

 * Although a man may wear fine clothing, if he lives peacefully; and is good, self-possessed, has faith and is pure; and if he does not hurt any living being, he is a holy man.
 * Gautama Buddha, as quoted in the Dhammapada.

Quotes about Diderot

 * Sorted alphabetically by author or source

 * If I had believed him, everything would have been turned upside down... all would have been turned topsy-turvy to make room for impractical theories.
 * Catherine the Great as quoted by Jackson J. Spielvogel

 * If ever anybody dedicated his whole life to the "enthusiasm for truth and justice" — using this phrase in the good sense — it was Diderot.
 * Friedrich Engels in Diderot: Interpreter of Nature (London: 1937)

 * Diderot took the ground that, if orthodox religion be true Christ was guilty of suicide. Having the power to defend himself he should have used it.
 * Robert Green Ingersoll in "Diderot" in The Great Infidels (1881); The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll Vol. III (1900), p. 367

 * Of course it would not do for the church to allow a man to die in peace who had added to the intellectual wealth of the world. The moment Diderot was dead, Catholic priests began painting and recounting the horrors of his expiring moments. They described him as overcome with remorse, as insane with fear; and these falsehoods have been repeated by the Protestant world, and will probably be repeated by thousands of ministers after we are dead. The truth is, he had passed his threescore years and ten. He had lived for seventy-one years. He had eaten his supper. He had been conversing with his wife. He was reclining in his easy chair. His mind was at perfect rest. He had entered, without knowing it, the twilight of his last day. Above the horizon was the evening star, telling of sleep. The room grew still and the stillness was lulled by the murmur of the street. There were a few moments of perfect peace. The wife said, "He is asleep." She enjoyed his repose, and breathed softly that he might not be disturbed. The moments wore on, and still he slept. Lovingly, softly, at last she touched him. Yes, he was asleep. He had become a part of the eternal silence.
 * Robert Green Ingersoll in "Diderot" in The Great Infidels (1881); The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll Vol. III (1900), p. 367

 * I don't understand how a man of good sense can accept for a single moment the sentence of the philosopher Diderot. It may well be high-sounding and incisive, it is nonetheless absurd and false. An who does not see, on the contrary, that it is not possible for the wicked man to love living alone and with himself? He would feel himself in company that is too bad, he would be too ill at ease, he would not be able to bear it for very long, or else, with his dominant passion remaining idle, it would have to die out and he would become good again. Amour-propre, the principle of all wickedness, is revived and thrives in society, which cause it to be born and where one is forced to compare oneself at each instant. It languishes and dies for want of nourishment in solitude. Whoever suffices to himself does not want to harm anyone at all. This maxim is less resounding and less arrogant, but more sensible and more just than that of the philosopher Diderot, and preferable at least in that it does not tend to offend anyone.
 * Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Dialogues: Rousseau Judge of Jean-Jacques (published 1782), Second Dialogue

title: Denis Diderot