"It is a mistake to think that the past is dead. Nothing that has ever happened is quite without influence at this moment. The present is merely the pa...
History is an excellent teacher with few pupils.
~ Will Durant ~
Photo by Ákos Szabó
Photo by Ian Turnell
History is an excellent teacher with few pupils.
More Will Durant quotes
"Most of us spend too much time on the last twenty-four hours and too little on the last six thousand years.
"One of the lessons of history is that nothing is often a good thing to do and always a clever thing to say.
"A nation is born stoic, and dies epicurean. At its cradle (to repeat a thoughtful adage) religion stands, and philosophy accompanies it to the grave. ...
"[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 generations together, handing down the lore of th...
"There are not many things finer in our murderous species than this noble curiosity, this restless and reckless passion to understand.
"[R]eligion arises not out of sacerdotal invention or chicanery, but out of the persistent wonder, fear, insecurity, hopefulness and loneliness of man.
"A history of civilization shares the presumptuousness of every philosophical enterprise: it offers the ridiculous spectacle of a fragment expounding t...
"For what is philosophy but an art - one more attempt to give "significant form" to the chaos of experience?
"Art is the creation of beauty; it is the expression of thought or feelingin a form that seems beautiful or sublime, and therefore arouses in us some r...
"Fear of death, wonder at the causes of chance events or unintelligible happenings, hope for divine aid and gratitude for good fortune, cooperated to g...
"The first source of art, then, is akin to the display of colors and plumage on the male animal in mating time; it lies in the desire to adorn and beau...
"In some way the god had to be appeased and satisfied; for his worshipers had made him in the image and dream of themselves, and he had no great regard...
"[V]irtue is not news, and virtuous men, like happy nations, have no history.