Thread by @BrentBeshore

This is the end of a memoir from the famous 20th c. atheist and formerly socialist historian Will Durant called "Fallen Leaves" which was discovered and published after his death at 96 in 1981. It's packed with beautiful prose and raw observations.

Here are some quotes:

https://twitter.com/BrentBeshore/status/1398963413242552321

"Our children bring us up by showing us, through imitation, what we really are."

"Childhood may be defined as the age of play; therefore some children are never young, and some adults are never old."

"Most men of forty are but a reminiscence, the burnt-out ashes of what was once a flame. The tragedy of life is that it gives us wisdom only when it has stolen youth."

"To be busy is the secret of grace, and half the secret of content. Let us ask the gods not for possessions, but for things to do; happiness is in making things rather than in consuming them."

"A bespectacled Chinese student described American universities as 'athletic associations in which certain opportunities for study are provided for the feeble-bodied."

"Nothing learned from a book is worth anything until it is used and verified in life."

"Discovering the world, youth discovers evil, and is worried to learn the nature of his species."

"Perhaps when it is too late we shall discover that we have sold the most previous thing in our civilization - the loyal love of a man for a woman - for the sake of the desolate security that cowards find in gold. Youth, if it were wise, would cherish love beyond all things."

"The increased conservatism of middle age is the result of wisdom, which perceives the complexity of institutions and the imperfections of desire; but partly it is the result of lowered energy, and corresponds to the immaculate morality of exhausted men."

"A man is as old as his arteries, and as young as his ideas."

"Youths with eager eyes will make the same errors as we, they will be misled by the same dreams; they will suffer, and wonder, and surrender, and grow old."

"Will is desire expressed in ideas that becomes actions unless impeded by contrary or substitute desires and ideas. Character is the sum of our desires, fears, propensities, habits, abilities, and ideas."

"I consider myself a Christian in the literal and difficult sense of sincerely admiring the personality and ethics of Christ and making a persistent effort to behave like a Christian."

"If I could live another life, endowed with my present mind and mood, I would not write history or philosophy, but would devote myself to establishing an association...free to have any tolerant theology or no theology at all, but pledged to follow the ethics of Christ."

"To me, 'the death of God' and the slow decay of Christianity in the educated classes of Christendom constitute the profoundest tragedy in modern Western history, of far deeper moment than the great wars or the competition between capitalism and communism."

"Through all the adventures of the mind among philosophies and creeds the figure of Christ remains the most appealing in history. We do not need a new religion so much as a return to the old one in its essentials and its simplicity."

"The state is the soul of man enlarged under the microscope of history."

"The first law of governments is self-preservation; their second law is self-extension; their appetite grows by what it feeds on, and they believe that when a state ceases to expand it begins to die."

"I was only 44, which is childhood in philosophy."

"History smiles at revolutions as understandable reactions but unprofitable and transient; they may give vent to just resentment, but they produce only surface change; under the new names and phrases the old realities survive."

"Civilization is a fragile bungalow precariously poised on a live volcano of barbarism."

"The individual, free from the family, idolized liberty and did not learn till too late that liberty is a child of order and may be the mother of chaos."

"Psychology has seemed to condemn every inhibition, and to justify every desire."

"Historical alternation of paganism and puritanism, we should expect our present moral laxity to be followed by some return to moral restraint...every age reacts against its predecessor."