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"And last are the few whose delight is in meditation and understanding; who yearn not for goods, nor for victory, but for knowledge; who leave both market and battlefield to lose themselves in the quiet clarity of secluded thought; whose will is a light rather than a fire, whose haven is not power but truth: these are the men of wisdom, who stand aside unused by the world."
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"Yet Byron never made tea as you do, who fill the pot so that when you put the lid on the tea spills over. There is a brown pool on the table-it is running among your books and papers. Now you mop it up, clumsily, with your pocket-hankerchief. You then stuff your hankerchief back into your pocket-that is not Byron; that is so essentially you that if I think of you in twenty years' time, when we are both famous, gouty and intolerable, it will be by that scene: and if you are dead, I shall weep."

"There is no saint here. I have attained wisdom from life's experiences... the positive, the negative, the destructive, the nourishing. I have been medicine and I have been poison. I've learned a lot about heaven from aligning with angels and I learned a lot about hell from acting like a devil. I offer my scars... what you call "wisdom"... as insight I have gathered from my comfort of living within both the light and the shadow."

"There comes a time when the mind takes a higher plane of knowledge but can never prove how it got there."
Explore more quotes by Will Durant


"No man is educated for statesmanship who cannot see his time from the perspective of the past."


"There is hardly an absurdity of the past that cannot be found flourishing somewhere in the present. Underneath all civilization, ancient or modern, moved and still moves a sea of magic, superstition and sorcery. Perhaps they will remain when the works of our reason have passed away."


"So I should say that civilizations begin with religion and stoicism: they end with scepticism and unbelief and the undisciplined pursuit of individual pleasure. A civilization is born stoic and dies epicurean."


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


"Art is the creation of beauty; it is the expression of thought or feelingin a form that seems beautiful or sublime, and therefore arouses in us some reverberation of that primordial delight which woman gives to man, or man to woman."
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