Historically the belief in heaven and the belief in utopia are like compensatory buckets in a well: when … - Will Durant

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"Ultimately the bond of all companionship, whether in marriage or in friendship, is conversation. " -If you press me to say why I loved him, I can say no more than it was because he was he and I was I.

Will Durant

Historically the belief in heaven and the belief in utopia are like compensatory buckets in a well: when one goes down the other comes up. When the classic religions decayed, communistic agitation rose in Athens (430 B. C. ), and revolution began in Rome (133 B. C. ); when these movements failed, resurrection faiths succeeded, culminating in Christianity; when, in our eighteenth century, Christian belief weakened, communism reappeared. In this perspective the future of religion is secure.

133, Christian, Christianity, Heaven, Perspective, Rome

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A great civilization is not conquered from without, until it has destroyed itself from within. The essential causes of Rome's decline lay in her people, her morals, her class struggle, her failing trade, her bureaucratic despotism, her stifling taxes, her consuming wars.

Class, Destroyed, Lay, People, Struggle, War

Forget mistakes. Forget failure. Forget everything except what you're going to do now and do it. Today is your lucky day

Forget, Inspirational, Life, Lucky, Positive, Today

Does history warrant the conclusion that religion is necessary to morality - that a natural ethic is too weak to withstand the savagery that lurks under civilization and emerges in our dreams, crimes and wars?. . . There is no significant example in history, before our time, of a society successfully maintaining moral life without the aid of religion.

Civilization, Dream, Ethic, Life, War, Weak

The Islamic conquest of India is probably the bloodiest story in history. It is a discouraging tale, for its evident moral is that civilization is a precious good, whose delicate complex of order and freedom, culture and peace, can at any moment be overthrown by barbarians invading from without or multiplying within.

Bloodiest, Civilization, Evident, Islamic, Order

So I should say that civilizations begin with religion and stoicism: they end with scepticism and unbelief, and the undisciplined pursuit of individual pleasure. A civilization is born stoic and dies epicurean.

Civilization, Pleasure, Religion, Stoic, Stoicism, Undisciplined