A Few Words From Will Durant
I have been reading Will Durant for some weeks now. Here are some thoughtful words from him.
My first request to you is: Be healthy. It is within your will. Barring inherited or childhood ailments, sickness is a crime; it means that you have done something physiologically foolish, and that nature is being hard put to it to repair your mistake. The pain is the tuition you pay for your instruction in living. It is a schooling from which we shall never graduate, except from life itself.
Be healthy and you will be happy; "be happy and you will be good." Let the vigor and cleanliness of your body be as precious to you as the integrity of your character and the clarity and strength of your mind.
Don't tale your politics too seriously. Don't expect to reform the government before you reform human nature, or your own. Corruption is natural in government because it is natural in man. Don't be frightened by the international situation; it is normal; man is a competitive animal, individually and in groups; peace is war by other means.
When your formal education is complete, give at least two hours a week to rounding yourselves out with these flowers of civilization. Make friends with great poets -- Sophocles, Euripides, Virgil, Dante, Petrarch, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Racine, Moliere, Goethe, Byron, Shelley, Keats, Whitman; with great art -- the Egyptian and Greek architects and sculptors, the Arabic builders and decorators, the Gothic cathedrals, the Renaissance painters, the composers from Bach to Rachmaninoff; with great statesmen from Hammurabi to Winston Churchill; with great thinkers -- Confucius, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Zeno, Epicurus, Archimedes, Lucretius, Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, Francis Bacon, Spinoza, Newton, Kant, Schopenhauer, Darwin, Einstein; with great prose writers -- Isaiah, Jeremiah, the authors of the Proverbs and the Psalms, Demosthenes, Cicero, Seneca, Rabelais, Montaigne, Milton, Voltaire, Hugo, Balzac, Anatole France; with great historians -- Herodotus, Thucydides, Tacitus, Gibbon, Macaulay, Guizot, Michelet, Froude; and with great saints -- Buddha, Jesus, Augustine, Francis of Assisi, Gandhi. I shall not consider you educated unless you make many of these geniuses your friends. Cultivate them, and you will be molded by the company you keep.
Good health to you, good work, good fortune, good character, good children, good grandchildren! Drink the brimming cup of life to the full and to the end, and thank God and nature for its trials and challenges, its punishments and rewards, its gifts of beauty, wisdom, labor, and love.
"I shall not consider you educated unless you make many of these geniuses your friends." I shall be humbled by reading this man! 🙌🏽