The Greatest Minds and Ideas of All Time   
Will Durant  

Summary

Summary of the great people of history written by a legendary historian

Rating: 4/5

Notes

Humour is akin to philosophy for they are both viewpoints born of a larger perspective of life

The real history of man is in the lasting contributions made by geniuses to the sum of human civilization and culture

If ideas do not determine history, inventions do and inventions are determined by ideas

Which of us is original except in form? What idea can we conceive today that has not enjoyed, in one year or another, the antiquity of time?

As for man, his days are as grass: as a flower in the field so he flourisheth. For the wind passeth over it and it’s done and the place there shall know it no more

Let me have 7 hours a week and I will make a scholar and philosopher out of you

Beauty is born in suffering and wisdom is the child of grief

Idiots are happier than geniuses and those who we most respect seek not happiness but greatness

There is less brutality now than in any recorded generation in the past

Consider education not as the painful accumulation of facts and dates but intimacy with history’s greatest men

12 most important dates of all time:

• 4241 BC: the invention of the Egyptian calendar
• 543 BC: when buddha died
• 478 BC: death of Confucius 
• 399 BC: death of socrates
• 44 BC: death of Caesar
• BC: death of christ
• 632 AD: death of Mohammed
• 1284 AD: death of roger bacon (inventor of gunpowder in the West)
• 1454: the first printed date on printed documents
• 1492: Columbus discovers America
• 1769: James Watt brings the steam engine to use; the dawn of the industrial revolution
• 1789: The French revolution

‘May my son study history for its is the only true psychology and only true history’ - Napoleon

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