Tao Te Ching
Pleasures of Philosophy
By Will Durant
"An attempt at a consistent philosophy of life," this book is a revised edition of The Mansions of Philosophy and attempts to show a path toward wisdom in a world of constant and unexpected change, an effort of integrating and making sense out of a world culture that had lost faith in the status quo religions, politics, and scientific understandings that were the guiding lights and unquestioned beliefs for numerous generations. It searches for meaning and relevance in an environment of rapid change, exploding knowledge, and an avalanche of information. Durant describes his inspiration for this book by saying, "We are being destroyed by our knowledge, which has made us drunk with power. And we shall not be saved without wisdom."
Themes
Quotes from Pleasures of Philosophy
“Can we again conceive philosophy as unified knowledge unifying life? Can we outline a kind of philosophy that might make its lovers capable of ruling first themselves and then a state, men worthy to be philosopher-kings?”
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“Divorce is like travel: it is useless if we cannot change ourselves... all wives and husbands are substantially alike”
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“Magic is the father of science... Many of the most famous and trusted cures in history were magical... It was to the advantage of the magicial to study causes and effects, to find natural means of accomplishing the desired end... our scientists in every filed of research are the direct descendants of those ancient magicians.”
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“Man is secretly and ravenously polygamous... and yet the earlier the love, the fresher and deeper it must be; no man can love after 30 with the ardor and self-abandonment of youth... if we could find a way to restore marriage to its natural age, we should at one stroke reduce by half the prostitution, the venereal disease, the fruitless celibacy, the morbid chastity, and the experimental perversions that stigmatize our contemporary life.”
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“Man is secretly and ravenously polygamous... and yet the earlier the love, the fresher and deeper it must be; no man can love after 30 with the ardor and self-abandonment of youth... if we could find a way to restore marriage to its natural age, we should at one stroke reduce by half the prostitution, the venereal disease, the fruitless celibacy, the morbid chastity, and the experimental perversions that stigmatize our contemporary life.”
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“PIcture Anaxagoras, who did the work of Darwin for the Greeks, and turned Pericles from a wine-pulling politician into a thinker and a statesman.”
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“Picture Democritus, the Laughing Philosopher; would he not be perilous company for the desiccated scholastics who have made the disputes about the reality of the external world take the place of medieval discourses on the number of angels that could sit on the point of a pin?”
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“Picture Thales who met the challenge that philosophers were numbskulls by 'cornering the market' and making a fortune in a year.”
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“The basic reality in life is not politics, nor industry, but human relationships—the associations of a man with a woman... the family is greater than the State, devotion and despair sink deeper into the heart than economic strife, in the end our happiness lies not in possessions, place, or power, but in the gift and return of love.”
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“The field of philosophy is not some petty puzzle hiding in the clouds and destitute of interest or influence in the affairs of mankind, but the vast and total problem of the meaning and value and possibilities of man in this boundless and fluent world.”
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“The lady butterfly is 15 times as long, and 10 times as heavy, as the male. Among insects, the female is almost always larger and stronger than the male.”
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“We are being destroyed by knowledge, which has made us drunk with our power. And we shall not be saved without wisdom.”
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