The Greatest Minds and Ideas of All Time
Author: Will Durant
This book was an inspiring way to start my year. It is a series of essays written by Durant to answer some of the common questions he was asked after writing his story of civilization series.
He starts the book off with a short essay about The Shameless Worship of Heroes. He argues that we should hold in high esteem the geniuses of history, and should learn from them. He then talks through the ten greatest thinkers of history. Next, he includes an essay on the ten greatest poets. Then he talks through and provides a list of the 100 best books for an education. The penultimate chapter is the ten “peaks” of human progress. The last chapter talks through twelve vital dates in human history.
The books is a great overview of world history, and some of the giants that came and went throughout. It provides lots of content to dive deeper into in the future. I am excited about the one hundred books list. He suggests spending an hour a day / 7 days a week on the books, and says if you follow that cadence, you will be done in four years.
I won’t write much more about the book here as I’d like to write a post on a similar theme to the book shortly, so I will discuss more of his ideas there.
Below are a few of the quotes that stood out to me while reading. Durant has a really nice way of writing. He is clear and persuasive, but is poetic at the same time.
Apparently beauty is born in suffering, and wisdom is the child of grief.
This then is our Odyssey of books. Here is another world, containing the selected excellence of a hundred generations; not quite so fair and vital as this actual world of nature and human enterprise, but abounding nevertheless in unsuspected wisdom and beauty unexplored. Life is better than literature, friendship is sweeter than philosophy, and children reach into our hearts with a profounder music than comes from any symphony, but even so these living delights offer no derogation to the modest and secondary pleasures of our books. When life is bitter, or friendship slips away, or perhaps our children leave us for their own haunts and homes, we shall come and sit at the table with Shakespeare and Goethe, and laugh at the world with Rabelais, and see its autumn loveliness with John Keats. For these are friends who give us only their best, who never answer back, and always wait our call. When we have walked with them awhile, and listened humbly to their speech, we shall be healed of our infirmities, and know the peace that comes of understanding.
Here we touch the very heart of our problem–are men morally better than they were? So far as intelligence is an element in morals, we have improved: the average of intelligence is higher, and there has been a great increase in the number of what we may vaguely call “developed” minds. So far as character is concerned, we have probably retrogressed: subtlety of thought has grown at the expense of stability of soul; in the presence of our fathers we intellectuals feel uncomfortable that though we surpass them in the number of ideas that we have crowded into our heads, and though we have liberated ourselves from delightful superstitions which still bring them and and comfort, we are inferior to them in uncomplaining courage, fidelity to our tasks and purposes, and simple strength of personality.
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; and all the villainy and politics of five continents are gathered upon one page for the encouragement of our breakfasts. We conclude that half the world is killing the other half, and that a large proportion of the remainder are committing suicide. But in the streets, in our homes, in public assemblies, in a thousand vehicles of transportation, we are astonished to find no murderers and no suicides, but rather a blunt democratic courtesy, and an unpretentious chivalry a hundred times more real than when men mouthed chivalric phrases, enslaved their women, and ensured the fidelity of their wives with irons while they fought for Christ in the Holy Land.
We need not fret, then, about the future. We are weary with too much war, and in our lassitude of mind we listen readily to a Spengler announcing the downfall of the Western world. But this learned arrangement of the birth and death of civilizations in even cycles is a trifle too precise; we may be sure that the future will play wild pranks with this mathematical despair. There have been wars before, and Man and civilization survived them; within fifteen years after Waterloo, defeated France was producing so many geniuses that every attic in Paris was occupied. Never was our heritage of civilization and culture so secure, and never was it half so rich. We may do our little share to augment it and transmit it, confident that time will wear away chiefly the dross of it, and that what is finally fair and worthy in it will be preserved, to illuminate many generations.