Will Durant Quotes
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Friends are helpful not only because they will listen to us, but because they will laugh at us; Through them we learn a little objectivity, a little modesty, a little courtesy; We learn the rules of life and become better players of the game.
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Grow strong, my comrade … that you may stand Unshaken when I fall; that I may know The shattered fragments of my song will come At last to finer melody in you; That I may tell my heart that you begin Where passing I leave off, and fathom more.
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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.
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A statesman cannot afford to be a moralist.
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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.
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Christianity did not destroy paganism; it adopted it.
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Human progress having reached a high level through respect for the liberty and dignity of men, it has become desirable to re-affirm these evident truths.
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History repeats itself in the large because human nature changes with geological leisureliness.
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The victors called the revolution a triumph of liberty; but now and then liberty in the slogans of the strong means freedom from restraint in the exploitation of the weak.
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Man is an emotional animal, occasionally rational; and through his feelings he can be deceived to his heart's content.
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History is so indifferently rich, that a case for almost any conclusion from it can be made by a selection of instances.
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The dog that buried the bone which even a canine appetite could not manage, the squirrel that gathered nuts for a later feast, the bees that filled the comb with honey, the ants that laid up stores for a rainy day - these were among the first creators of civilization. It was they....who taught our ancestors the art of providing for tomorrow out of the surplus of today, or of preparing for winter in summer's time of plenty.
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There is no real philosophy until the mind turns around and examines itself.
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Moral codes adjust themselves to environmental conditions.
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Civilizaton is the interval between Ice Ages.
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Which is now a more hopeful statement than Swift intended it to be.
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To rulers religion, like almost everything else, is a tool of power.
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To speak ill of others is a dishonest way of praising ourselves; let us be above such transparent egotism. If you can't say good and encouraging things, say nothing. Nothing is often a good thing to do, and always a clever thing to say.
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Can a civilization hold together if man abandons his faith in God?
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There is no significant example in history, before our time, of a society successfully maintaining moral life without the aid of religion.
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There is nothing in socialism that a little age or a little money will not cure.
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Nothing is new except arrangement.
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The South creates the civilizations, the North conquers them, ruins them, borrows from them, spreads them: this is one summary of history.
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The finger that turns the dial rules the air.