Will Durant Quotes

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

~ Will Durant

I was only 44, which is childhood philosophy.

~ Will Durant

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

~ Will Durant

If we rated greatness by the influence of the great, we will say Muhammad is the greatest of the great in history

~ Will Durant

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

~ Will Durant

All science is a charted ignorance and belongs to Maya.

~ Will Durant

Make wisdom human to the adolescent mind.

~ Will Durant

But the new generation had tasted the wine of philosophy, and from this time onward the rich youth of Rome went eagerly to Athens and Rhodes to exchange their oldest faith for the newest doubts.

~ Will Durant

If there is any intelligence guiding this universe, philosophy wishes to know and understand it and reverently work with it; if there is none, philosophy wishes to know that also, and face it without fear. If the stars are but transient coagulations of haphazard nebulae, if life is a colloidal accident, impersonally permanent and individually fleeting, if man is only a compound of chemicals, destined to disintegrate and utterly disappear, if the creative ecstasy of art, and the gentle wisdom of the sage, and the willing martyrdom of saints are but bright incidents in the protoplasmic pullulation of the earth, and death is the answer to every problem and the destiny of every soul--then philosophy will face that too, and try to find within that narrowed circle some significance and nobility for man.

~ Will Durant

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

~ Will Durant

Hence a certain tension between religion and society marks the higher stages of every civilization. Religion begins by offering magical aid to harassed and bewildered men, it culminates by giving to a people that unity of morals and belief which seems so favorable to statesmanship and art, it ends by fighting suicidally in the lost cause of the past.

~ Will Durant

There is hardly an absurdity of the past that cannot be found flourishing somewhere in the present. Underneath all civilization, ancient or modern, moved and still moves a sea of magic, superstition and sorcery. Perhaps they will remain when the works of our reason have passed away.

~ Will Durant

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

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 at 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

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

~ Will Durant

Grow strong, my comrade … that you may standUnshaken when I fall; that I may knowThe shattered fragments of my song will comeAt last to finer melody in you;That I may tell my heart that you beginWhere passing I leave off, and fathom more.

~ Will Durant

Intolerance is the natural concomitant of strong faith, tolerance grows only when faith loses certainty, certainty is murderous.

~ Will Durant

Death like style is the removal of rubbish.

~ Will Durant

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

~ Will Durant

Forget mistakes. Forget failure. Forget everything except what you're going to do now and do it. Today is your lucky day.

~ Will Durant

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

~ Will Durant

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

~ Will Durant

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

~ Will Durant

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

~ Will Durant

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

~ Will Durant

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

~ Will Durant

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

~ Will Durant

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

~ Will Durant

Every science begins as philosophy and ends as art.

~ Will Durant

In my youth I stressed freedom, and in my old age I stress order. I have made the great discovery that liberty is a product of order.

~ Will Durant

History is mostly guessing the rest is prejudice.

~ Will Durant

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

~ Will Durant

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

~ Will Durant

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

~ Will Durant

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

~ Will Durant

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

~ Will Durant

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

~ Will Durant

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

~ Will Durant

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

~ Will Durant

Moral codes adjust themselves to environmental conditions.

~ Will Durant