Tao Te Ching

The Power of Goodness, the Wisdom Beyond Words
Search Quotes Search Sages Search Chapters

Transition

By Will Durant

Fascinating autobiography Will Durant published when he was forty-two. A very personal, first-hand account of America abandoning it’s more insular and pacifist policies to join in World War I and embark on an almost continuous string of wars that have grown and continue to grow today. The country’s transitions in some ways parallel his own from studying to become a priest through falling in love and marrying his 15 year old student when he was twenty-eight.

Quotes from Transition

“After all, what does it matter what price we pay for love?”

Chapters:

Themes: Love

Comments: Click to comment

“I became almost reconciled to mortality, knowing that my spirit would survive me enshrined in a fairer mold ... my little worth somehow preserved in the heritage of men.”

Chapters:

Themes: Egolessness

Comments: Click to comment

“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”

Chapters:

Comments: Click to comment

“I said nothing. I had learned that this is usually the best thing to say.”

Chapters:

Comments: Click to comment

“In all things I saw the passion of life for growth and greatness, the drama of everlasting creation.”

Chapters:

Themes: Sacred World

Comments: Click to comment

“Love is a cannibal of friendships.”

Chapters:

Themes: Friendship

Comments: Click to comment

“Our philosophy is a function of our age of life. We pass through utopias and idealism to knowledge and limitation”

Chapters:

Themes: Old Age

Comments: Click to comment

“the need of a philosophy that would do justice to the infinite vitality of nature [to ] the inexhaustible activity of the atom, the endless resourcefulness of plants, the teeming fertility of animals, the hunger and movement of infants, the laughter and play of children, the love and devotion of youth, the restless ambition of fathers and the lifelong sacrifice of mothers, the undiscourageable researches of scientists and the sufferings of genius, the crucifixion of prophets and the martyrdom of saints”

Chapters:

Themes: Philosophy

Comments: Click to comment

“The old agricultural view of the world in terms of seed and growth did far more justice to the complexity and irrepressible expansiveness of things.”

Chapters:

Comments: Click to comment

“The true City of God: that fair and pleasant Country of the Mind where all the great dead are still alive, and wisdom makes with beauty an eternal music.”

Chapters:

Themes: Music Shambhala

Comments: Click to comment

“We can always trust the tongue to conceal the heart.”

Chapters:

Themes: Deception

Comments: Click to comment

“We would go off to bill and coo, to thrill and woo, and all the dogs in Christendom might howl their moralistic protest unhonored and unheard.”

Chapters:

Themes: Crazy Wisdom

Comments: Click to comment

“What can one weak individual do when the species announces to him that his time has come?”

Chapters:

Themes: Free Will

Comments: Click to comment

“What did it matter which religion we professed or which philosophy we believed, any more than which language we spoke or what clothes we wore?”

Chapters:

Comments: Click to comment

“Where I had seen omnipresent death, I saw now everywhere the pageant and triumph of life.”

Chapters:

Comments: Click to comment

Related Lineages (0 lineages)

Quotes about Transition (0 quotes)

Comments (0)