Will Durant Quotes
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So I should say that civilizations begin with religion and stoicism: they end with scepticism and unbelief, and the undisciplined pursuit of individual pleasure. A civilization is born stoic and dies epicurean.
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History is always repeating itself, but each time the price goes up.
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To give life a meaning, one must have a purpose larger than self.
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It is true that even across the Himalayan barrier India has sent to the west, such gifts as grammar and logic, philosophy and fables, hypnotism and chess, and above all numerals and the decimal system.
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I have tried to be impartial, though I know that a man's past always colors his views, and that nothing else is so irritating as impartiality.
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Contentment is rare among men as it is natural among animals.
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We Americans are the best informed people on earth as to the events of the last twenty-four hours; we are the not the best informed as the events of the last sixty centuries.
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Every science begins as philosophy and ends as art; it arises in hypothesis and flows into achievement.
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Cultivate your garden. Do not depend upon teachers to educate you... follow your own bent, pursue your curiosity bravely, express yourself, make your own harmony.
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Tolerance grows only when faith loses certainty; certainty is murderous.
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It came to me that reform should begin at home, and since that day I have not had time to remake the world.
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Time sanctifies everything; even the most arrant theft in the hands of the robber's grandchildren becomes sacred and inviolable property.
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If we have never been amazed by the very fact that we exist, we are squandering the greatest fact of all.
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Knowledge is power but only wisdom is liberty.
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And last are the few whose delight is in meditation and understanding; who yearn not for goods, nor for victory, but for knowledge; who leave both market and battlefield to lose themselves in the quiet clarity of secluded thought; whose will is a light rather than a fire, whose haven is not power but truth: these are the men of wisdom, who stand aside unused by the world.
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Education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance.
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Civilization is a stream with banks. The stream is sometimes filled with blood from people killing, stealing, shouting and doing the things historians usually record, while on the banks, unnoticed, people build homes, make love, raise children, sing songs, write poetry and even whittle statues. The story of civilization is what happened on the banks.
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Those who know nothing about history are doomed forever to repeat it.
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Civilization exists by geological consent, subject to change without notice.
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Most of us spend too much time on the last twenty-four hours and too little on the last six thousand years.
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Rome remained great as long as she had enemies who forced her to unity, vision, and heroism. When she had overcome them all she flourished for a moment and then began to die.
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There is hardly an absurdity of the past that cannot be found flourishing somewhere in the present.
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All deductions having been made, democracy has done less harm, and more good, than any other form of government. It gave to human existence a zest and camaraderie that outweighed its pitfalls and defects. It gave to thought and science and enterprise the freedom essential to their operation and growth. It broke down the walls of privilege and class, and in each generation it raised up ability from every rank and place.
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The political machine triumphs because it is a united minority acting against a divided majority.