Stefan

“Water is the usual drink, but everyone has wine, for no civilization has found life tolerable without narcotics or stimulants.”
― Will Durant, The Life of Greece

“Only a philosopher can be happy in marriage, and philosophers do not marry.”
― Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy

“Three meals a day are a highly advanced institution. Savages gorge themselves or fast.”2 The wilder tribes among the American Indians considered it weak-kneed and unseemly to preserve food for the next day.3 The natives of Australia are incapable of any labor whose reward is not immediate; every Hottentot is a gentleman of leisure; and with the Bushmen of Africa it is always “either a feast or a famine.”
― Will Durant, Our Oriental Heritage

“Ultimately there are but three systems of ethics, three conceptions of the ideal character and the moral life.

One is that of Buddha and Jesus, which stresses the feminine virtues, considers all men to be equally precious, resists evil only by returning good, identifies virtue with love, and inclines in politics to unlimited democracy.

Another is the ethic of Machiavelli and Nietzsche, which stresses the masculine virtues, accepts the inequality of men, relishes the risks of combat and conquest and rule, identifies virtue with power, and exalts an hereditary aristocracy.

A third, the ethic of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, denies the universal applicability of either the feminine or the masculine virtues; considers that only the informed and mature mind can judge, according to diverse circumstance, when love should rule, and when power; identifies virtue, therefore, with intelligence; and advocates a varying mixture of aristocracy and democracy in government.”
― Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy: The Lives and Opinions of the World's Greatest Philosophers