https://archive.org/stream/TheStoryOfCivilizationcomplete/Durant_Will_-_The_story_of_civilization_1#page/n5/mode/2up/search/one+life
"Civilization is social order promoting cultural creation. Four elements constitute it: economic provision, political organization, moral traditions, and the pursuit of knowledge and the arts. It begins where chaos and insecurity end. For when fear is overcome, curiosity and constructiveness are free, and man passes by natural impulse towards the understanding and embellishment of life."
Will Durant, Story of Civilization, Vol.1: Our Oriental Heritage, Ch.1, 1935
"[...] If the soil is fertile in food or mineral, if rivers offer easy avenue of exchange, if the coast-line is indented with natural harbors for a commercial fleet, if, above all, a nation lies on the highroad of the world's trade, like Athens or Carthage, Florence or Venice -- then geography, though it can never create it, smiles upon civilization, and nourishes it."
Will Durant, Story of Civilization, Vol.1: Our Oriental Heritage, Ch.1, 1935 (italics added)
"Economic conditions are more important. A people may possess ordered institutions, a lofty moral code, and even a flair for the minor forms of art, like the American Indians; and yet if it remains in the hunting stage, if it depends for its experience on the precarious fortunes of the chase, it will never quite pass from barbarism to civilization. A nomad stock, like to Bedouins of Arabia, may be exceptionally intelligent and vigorous, it may display high qualities of character like courage, generosity, and nobility; but without the sine qua non of culture, a continuity of food, its intelligence will be lavished on the perils of the hunt and the tricks of the trade, and nothing will remain on the laces and frills, the curtsies and amenities, the arts and comforts, of civilization. The first form of culture is agriculture. It is when man settles down to till the soil and lay up provisions for the uncertain future that he finds time and reason to be civilized. Within that little circle of security -- a reliable supply of water and food -- he builds his huts, his temples and his schools; he invents productive tools, and he domesticates the dog, the ass, the pig, at last himself. He learns to work with regularity and order, maintains a longer tenure of life, and transmits more completely than before the mental and moral heritage of his race."
Will Durant, Story of Civilization, Vol.1: Our Oriental Heritage, Ch.1, 1935
"Culture suggests agriculture, but civilization suggests the city. [...] For in the city are gathered, rightly or wrongly, the wealth and brains produced in the countryside; in the city invention and industry multiply comforts, luxuries, and leisure; in the cities traders meet, and barter goods and ideas; in that cross-fertilization of minds at the crossroads of trade intelligence is sharpened and stimulated to to creative power. In the city some men are set aside from the making of material things, and produce science and philosophy, literature and art. Civilization begins in the peasant's hut, but it comes to flower only in towns."
Will Durant, Story of Civilization, Vol.1: Our Oriental Heritage, Ch.1, 1935 (italics added)
"There are no racial conditions to civilization. It may appear on any continent and in any color: at Pekin or Delhi, at Memphis or Babylon, at Ravenna or London, in Peru or Yucatan. It is not the great race that makes the civilization, it is the great civilization that makes the people; circumstances geographical and economic create the culture, and the culture creates a type. The Englishman does not make British civilization, it makes him; if he carries it with him wherever he goes, and dresses for dinner in Timbuktu, it is not that he is creating his civilization there anew, but that he acknowledges even there its mastery over his soul. Given like material conditions, and another race would beget like results; Japan reproduces in the twentieth century the history of England in the nineteenth. Civilization is related to race only in the sense that it is often preceded by the slow intermarriage of different stocks, and their gradual assimilation into a relatively homogeneous people."
Will Durant, Story of Civilization, Vol.1: Our Oriental Heritage, Ch.1, 1935 (italics added)
"These physical and biological conditions are only prerequisites to civilization; they do not constitute or generate it. Subtle psychological factors must enter into play. There must be political order, even if it be so near to chaos as in Renaissance Florence or Rome; men must feel, by and large, that they need not look for death or taxes at every turn. There must be some unity of language to serve as a medium of mental exchange. Through church, or family, or school, or otherwise, there must be a unifying moral code, some rules of the game of life acknowledged even by those who violate them, and giving to conduct some order and regularity, some direction and stimulus. Perhaps there must also be some unity of basic belief, some faith, supernatural or utopian, that lifts morality from calculation to devotion, and gives life nobility and significance despite our moral brevity. And finally there must be education -- some technique, however primitive, for the transmission of culture. Whether through imitation, initiation or instruction, whether through father or mother, teacher or priest, the lore or heritage of the tribe -- its language and knowledge, its morals and manners, its technology and arts -- must be handed down to the young, as the very instrument through which they are turned from animals to men."
Will Durant, Story of Civilization, Vol.1: Our Oriental Heritage, Ch.1, 1935 (italics added)
"The disappearances of these conditions [that is, as previously outlined, economic provision, political organization, moral traditions, and the pursuit of knowledge and the arts]-- sometimes of even one of them -- may destroy a civilization. [...] For civilization is not something inborn or imperishable; it must be acquired anew every generation, and any serious interruption in its financing or its transmission may bring it to an end. Man differs from the beast only by education, which may be defiled as the technique of transmitting civilization."
Will Durant, Story of Civilization, Vol.1: Our Oriental Heritage, Ch.1, 1935
"Civilizations are the generations of the racial soul. As family-rearing, and then writing, bound the generations together, handing down the lore of the dying to the young, so print and commerce and a thousand ways of communication may bind the civilizations together, and preserve for future cultures all that is of value for them in our own. Let us, before we die, gather up our heritage, and offer it to our children."
Will Durant, Story of Civilization, Vol.1: Our Oriental Heritage, Ch.1, 1935
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