Will Durant Quotes

Every science begins as philosophy and ends as art.

..we have become wealthy, and wealth is the prelude to art. In every country where centuries of phys...

And again, though we cannot prove, we feel, that we are deathless. We perceive that life is not like...

Science is organized knowledge. Wisdom is organized life.

Grow strong, my comrade … that you may standUnshaken when I fall; that I may knowThe shattered fragm...

[Voltaire] theoretically prefers a republic, but he knows its flaws: it permits factions which, if t...

We are tossed about by external causes in many ways, and like waves driven by contrary winds, we wav...

The matter of sedition is of two kinds: much poverty and much discontentment....The causes and motiv...

And last are the few whose delight is in meditation and understanding; who yearn not for goods, nor ...

Hence I think it is that democracies change into aristocracies, and these at length into monarchies,...

But he had expressed to Mme. du Chatelet the hope that a way out might lie in applying philosophy to...

[V]irtue is not news, and virtuous men, like happy nations, have no history.

The story of the "bondage" in Egypt, of the use of the Jews as slaves in great construction enterpri...

[I]ndeed, one hears, in early Christian theology, as many echoes of Persian dualism as of Hebrew Pur...

Knowledge is the eye of desire and can become the pilot of the soul.

The institutions, conventions, customs and laws that make up the complex structure of a society are ...

War does one good—it teaches people geography.

Nature smiles at the union of freedom and equality in our utopias. For freedom and equality are swor...

...but which of us has read every line of the Iliad, or the Aeneid, or The Divine Comedy, or Paradis...

We conclude that the concentration of wealth is natural and inevitable, and is periodically alleviat...

Civilization is the order and freedom is promoting cultural activity.

Truth always originates in a minority of one, and every custom begins as a broken precedent.

Our knowledge is a receding mirage in an expanding desert of ignorance.

The state is the soul of man enlarged under the microscope of history.

So the conservative who resists change is as valuable as the radical who proposes it -- perhaps as m...

If we rated greatness by the influence of the great, we will say "Muhammad is the greatest of the gr...

Education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance.

Bankers know that history is inflationary and that money is the last thing a wise man will hoard.

We must steel ourselves against utopias and be content with a slightly better state.

Even when repressed, inequality grows; only the man who is below the average in economic ability des...

In progressive societies the concentration[of wealth] may reach a point where the strength of number...

I was only 44, which is childhood philosophy.

Forget mistakes. Forget failure. Forget everything except what you're going to do now and do it. Tod...

History is an excellent teacher with few pupils.

Every form of government tends to perish by excess of its basic principle.

So the story of man runs in a dreary circle, because he is not yet master of the earth that holds hi...

History is mostly guessing the rest is prejudice.

A man is as old as his arteries and as young as his ideas.

The trouble with most people is that they think with their hopes or fears or wishes rather than with...

[W]orship, if not the child, is at leastthe brother, of fear.

Men who can manage men manage the men who can manage only things.

When liberty destroys order the hunger for order will destroy liberty.

Tired mothers find that spanking takes less time than reasoning and penetrates sooner to the seat of...

No man is educated for statesmanship who cannot see his time from the perspective of the past.

Nobody loves a policeman until he needs one.

Make wisdom human to the adolescent mind.

Every civilization is a fruit from the sturdy tree of barbarism, and falls at the greatest distance ...

Magic begins in superstition, and ends in science. ... At every step the history of civilization tea...

Forget mistakes. Forget failures. Forget everything except what you're going to do now and do it. To...

Nature has never read the Declaration of Independence. It continues to make us unequal.

Science gives us knowledge, but only philosophy can give us wisdom.

Death like style is the removal of rubbish.

So I should say that civilizations begin with religion and stoicism: they end with scepticism and un...

Civilization exists by geological consent, subject to change without notice.

There have been only 268 of the past 3,421 years free of war.

The family is the nucleus of civilization.

In my youth I stressed freedom, and in my old age I stress order. I have made the great discovery th...

One of the lessons of history is that nothing is often a good thing to do and always a clever thing ...

Civilization is not inherited it has to be learned and earned by each generation anew…

We are what we repeatedly do. Greatness then, is not an act, but a habit

but now and then liberty, in the slogans of the strong, means freedom from restraint in the exploita...

A nation is born stoic, and dies epicurean. At its cradle (to repeat a thoughtful adage) religion st...

There is hardly an absurdity of the past that cannot be found flourishing somewhere in the present. ...

[S]hame is a child of custom rather than of nature.

Civilizations are the generations of the racial soul. As family-rearing, and then writing, bound the...

There are not many things finer in our murderous species than this noble curiosity, this restless an...

[R]eligion arises not out of sacerdotal invention or chicanery, but out of the persistent wonder, fe...

A history of civilization shares the presumptuousness of every philosophical enterprise: it offers t...

For what is philosophy but an art - one more attempt to give "significant form" to the chaos of expe...

Art is the creation of beauty; it is the expression of thought or feelingin a form that seems beauti...

[N]o language has ever had a word for a virgin man.

Fear of death, wonder at the causes of chance events or unintelligible happenings, hope for divine a...

The first source of art, then, is akin to the display of colors and plumage on the male animal in ma...

All science is a charted ignorance and belongs to Maya.

In some way the god had to be appeased and satisfied; for his worshipers had made him in the image a...

Nothing is often a good thing to do and always a good thing to say.

The individual succumbs but he does not die if he has left something to mankind.

Never mind your happiness do your duty.

To say nothing, especially when speaking, is half the art of diplomacy.

The past is not dead. Indeed, it is often not even past.

Most of us spend too much time on the last twenty-four hours and too little on the last six thousand...

It is a mistake to think that the past is dead. Nothing that has ever happened is quite without infl...

Moral codes adjust themselves to environmental conditions.

The love we have in our youth is superficial compared to the love that an old man has for his old wi...

Sixty years ago I knew everything now I know nothing education is a progressive discovery of our own...

If there is any intelligence guiding this universe, philosophy wishes to know and understand it and ...