QUOTES: Story of Civilization, Pt.1 Our Oriental Heritage, by Will Durant, 1935 -- Introduction

https://archive.org/stream/TheStoryOfCivilizationcomplete/Durant_Will_-_The_story_of_civilization_1#page/n5/mode/2up/search/one+life

"I have tried in this book to accomplish the first part of a pleasant assignment which I rashly laid upon myself some twenty years ago: to write a history of civilization. I wish to tall as much as I can, in as little space as I can, of the contributions that genius and labor have made to the cultural heritage of mankind -- to chronicle and contemplate, in their causes, character and effects, the advances of invention, the varieties of economic organization, the experiments of government, the aspirations of religion, the mutations of morals and manners, the masterpieces of literature, the development of science, the wisdom of philosophy, and the achievements of art. I do not need to be told how absurd this enterprise is, nor how immodest is its very conception; for many years of effort have brought it to but a fifth of its completion, and have made it clear that no one mind, and no single lifetime, can adequately compass this task. Nevertheless I have dreamed that despite the many errors inevitable in this undertaking, it may be of some use to those whom the passion of philosophy has laid the compulsion to try and see things whole, to pursue perspective, unity and understanding through history in time, as well as to seek them through science in space."
Will Durant, Story of Civilization, Pt.1: Our Oriental Heritage, Introduction, 1935 (italics added)

"I have long felt that our usual method of writing history in separate longitudinal section -- economic history, political history, religious history, the history of philosophy, the history of literature, the history of science, the history of music, the history of art -- does injustice to the unity of human life; that history should be written collaterally as well as lineally, synthetically as well as analytically; and that the ideal historiography would seek to portray in each period the total complex of a nation's culture, institutions, adventures and ways. But the accumulation of knowledge has divided history, like science, into a thousand isolated specialties; and prudent scholars have refrained from attempting any view of the whole -- whether of the material universe, or of the living past of our race. For the probability of errors increases with the scope of the undertaking, and any man who sells his soul to synthesis will be a tragic target for the myriad merry darts of the specialist critique. "Consider," said Ptah-motep five thousand years ago, "how thou mayest be opposed by an expert in council. It is foolish to speak on every kind of work." A history of civilization shares the presumptuousness of every philosophical enterprise: it offers the ridiculous spectacle of a fragment expounding the whole. Like philosophy, such a venture has no rational excuse, and is a best but a brave stupidity; but let us hope that, like philosophy, it will always lure some rash spirits into its fatal depths."
Will Durant, Story of Civilization, Pt.1: Our Oriental Heritage, Introduction, 1935 (italics added)

"Our story begins with the Orient, not merely because Asia was the scene of the oldest civilizations known to us, but because those civilizations formed the background and basis of that Greek and Roman culture which Sir Henry Maine mistakenly supposed to be the whole source of the modern mind. We shall be surprised to learn how much of our most indispensable inventions, our economic and political organization, our science and our literature, our philosophy an dour religion, goes back to Egypt and the Orient. At this historic moment -- when the ascendancy of Europe is so rapidly coming to an end, when Asia is swelling with resurrected life, and the theme of the twentieth century seems destined to be an all-embracing conflict between the East and the West -- the provincialism of our traditional histories, whichbegan with Greece and summed up Asia in a line, has become no merely academic error, but a possibly fatal failure of perspective and intelligence. [...]"
Will Durant, Story of Civilization, Pt.1: Our Oriental Heritage, Introduction, 1935 (italics added)

"[The] weary author may sympathize with Tai T'ung, who in the thirteenth century issued his History of Chinese Writing with these words: "Were I to await perfection, my book would never be finished."
Quoted from Carter, T.F., The Inventions of Printing in China, and Its Spread Westward; New York, 1925, p.xviii; in Will Durant, Story of Civilization, Pt.1: Our Oriental Heritage, Introduction, 1935

"[...] I shall proceed as rapidly as time and circumstance will permit, hoping that a few of my contemporaries will care to grow old with me while learning, and that these volumes may help some of our children to understand and enjoy the infinite riches of our inheritance."
Will Durant, Story of Civilization, Pt.1: Our Oriental Heritage, Introduction, 1935