Tao Te Ching

The Power of Goodness, the Wisdom Beyond Words
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Honi Werner

Greatest Minds and Ideas of All Time

By Will Durant

Unlike most famous historians and philosophers, Durant became highly respected and even somewhat famous during his lifetime. His numerous books however, spanning thousands and thousands of page proves a little daunting to all but the unusual reader. His fame brought requests for public talks, these talks invited questions, and answers to these questions became magazine articles and summarizing lists like The 10 Greatest Thinkers, The 10 Greatest Poets, and The 100 Best Books. 20 years after Durant died, John Little compiled these condensed evaluations into this short (118 page) but potent and easily accessible little book

Quotes from Greatest Minds and Ideas of All Time

“Buddhism does not follow Buddha, but is a mass of legends and superstitions that have no more right to use his name than the ferocious Christianity of Calvin or Torquemada or Tennessee has to use the name of Christ.”

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Themes: Buddhism

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“It is in Dostoevsky that we find our secret hearts revealed, and our secret longings understood”

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“Love—unknown to primitive men, or only as a hunger of the flesh—has flowered into a magnificent garden of song and sentiment, in which the passion of a man for a maid, though vigorously rooted in physical need, rises like incense into the realm of living poetry.”

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Themes: Poetry Sex

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“No other soul has ever been so influential... let us take the date of Buddha as the beginning of a civilization that has known every vicissitude, every injustice, every slavery, and yet in the midst of it has produced geniuses and saints from Buddha and Ashoka to Gandhi and Tagore.”

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“Our prevailing mode of marriage—chaotic and deliquescent as it is—represents a pleasant refinement on marriage by capture or purchase... there is less brutality between men and women... The emancipation of woman and her ascendancy over man indicate an unprecedented gentility in the once murderous male.”

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Themes: Marriage

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“The greatest poet as well as the greatest philosopher of Rome, Lucretius was a strange man, nervous and unstable—a man born for peace but forced to live in the midst of Caesar's alarms; a man with the make-up of a mystic and a saint, hardening himself into a materialist and a skeptic.”

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“These multiplying inventions are the new organs with which we control our environment... menial labor that degraded both master and man is lifted from human shoulders... man will be freed for the tasks of the mind.”

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“We think there is more violence in the world than before, but in truth there are only more newspapers; vast and powerful organizations scour the planet for crimes and scandals that will console their readers for stenography and monogamy.”

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Themes: Aggression

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“With all the power of Shakespeare, this reckless dramatist—strong enough to speak out, brave enough in the very fever of war to show its futile bestiality and brave enough to show the Greeks to the Greeks as barbarians in victory, and their enemies as heroes in defeat—became a denouncer of slavery, critic and understanding defender of women, doubter of all certainties, and lover of all men.”

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