Facts" replaced understanding; and knowledge, split into a thousand isolated fragments, no longer generated wisdom.

The form of Christianity that developed in Europe and later spread to America and the rest of the world was the last great creation of the ancient pagan world.

In its youth a people produce mythology and poetry; in its decadence, philosophy and logic.

This is the tragedy of almost every civilization—that its soul is in its faith, and seldom survives philosophy.

Normally and generally men are judged by their ability to produce—except in war, when they are ranked according to their ability to destroy.

To say nothing, especially when speaking, is half the art of diplomacy.

When a man is interested in the past he writes history; when he is interested in the future he makes it.

To confer a kindness is a mark of superiority; to receive one is a mark of subordination . . .

But he had gained a perspective of thought in which every extreme was seen as a half-truth,

I thank God,” he used to say, “that I was born Greek and not barbarian, freeman and not slave, man and not woman; but above all, that I was born in the age of

For what is philosophy but an art - one more attempt to give "significant form" to the chaos of experience?

Progress is the domination of chaos by mind and purpose, of matter by form and will. It need not be continuous to be real.

There are not many things finer in our murderous species than this noble curiosity, this restless and reckless passion to understand.

Civilization exists by geologic consent, subject to change without notice.

Human behavior, says Plato, flows from three main sources: desire, emotion, and knowledge.

The worst conceivable government would be by philosophers; they botch every natural process with theory; their ability to make speeches and multiply ideas is precisely the sign of their incapacity for action.

There is no real philosophy until the mind turns round and examines itself.

Economic development specializes functions, differentiates abilities, and makes men unequally valuable to their group.

A book is like a quarrel. One word leads to another, and may erupt in blood or print, irrevocably.

Coarse necessities of physical existence drag him from the heights of thought into the mart of economic strife and gain.

All science is a charted ignorance and belongs to Maya.

It was his motto that one lived best by the hidden life—bene vixit qui bene latuit.

The historian always oversimplifies, and hastily selects a manageable minority of facts and faces out of a crowd of souls and events whose multitudinous complexity he can never quite embrace or comprehend.

So the conservative who resists change is as valuable as the radical who proposes it—perhaps as much more valuable as roots are more vital than grafts.

And, after speech, it provided a readier instrument for the dissemination of nonsense than the world has ever known until our time.

Fear of death, wonder at the causes of chance events or unintelligible happenings, hope for divine aid and gratitude for good fortune, cooperated to generate religious belief.

If ideas do not determine history, inventions do; and inventions are determined by ideas.

In some way the god had to be appeased and satisfied; for his worshipers had made him in the image and dream of themselves, and he had no great regard for human life, or womanly tears.

The strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must.

I was only 44, which is childhood philosophy.

We must steel ourselves against utopias and be content with a slightly better state.

When a band of flute players attempted a musical concert at a triumph in 167, the audience forced the musicians to change their performance into a boxing match.15 In the widening middle classes commercialism

Peace is war by other means.

When Germany defeated Napoleon it was a disastrous to culture as when Luther defeated the Church.

Democritus (460-360 B.C.)— "in reality there is nothing but atoms and space.

By 1911 I found it impossible to continue my pretenses to orthodoxy;

[S]hame is a child of custom rather than of nature.

Not to be occupied, and not to exist, amount to the same thing," he said. "All people are good except those who are idle.

[W]orship, if not the child, is at least the brother, of fear.

Death like style is the removal of rubbish.

Let us trust to ourselves, see all with our own eyes; Let these be our oracles, our tripods and our gods.

He who leaves his home in search of knowledge walks in the path of God … and the ink of the scholar is holier than the blood of the martyr”;

A disintegrating individualism had weakened the Athenian character, and left the city a prey at last to the sternly-nurtured Spartans.

What I am not,” he says, most truthfully, “that for me is God

Radicalism is a luxury of stability; we may dare to change things only when things lie steady under our hands.

He is his own best friend, and takes delight in privacy whereas the man of no virtue or ability is his own worst enemy, and is afraid of solitude.59 Such

Animals eat one another without qualm; civilized men consume one another by due process of law. Co-operation

If you look at a map of Europe you will observe that Greece is a skeleton-like hand stretching its crooked fingers out into the Mediterranean Sea.

There his chief enterprises are reading and doing nothing.