Will Durant Quotes
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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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Men decided that it was better to pay taxes than to fight among themselves; better to pay tribute to one magnificent robber than to bribe them all.
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Fundamentalism is the triumph of Paul over Christ.
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No man who is in a hurry is quite civilized.
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Our knowledge is a receding mirage in an expanding desert of ignorance.
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Civilization exists by geological consent, subject to change without notice.
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Education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance.
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To give life a meaning, one must have a purpose larger than self.
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Science without philosophy, facts without perspective and valuation, cannot save us from havoc and despair. Science gives us knowledge, but only philosophy can give us wisdom.
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The political machine triumphs because it is a united minority acting against a divided majority.
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When liberty exceeds intelligence, it begets chaos, which begets dictatorship.
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Civilization is not inherited; it has to be learned and earned by each generation anew; if the transmission should be interrupted for one century, civilization would die, and we should be savages again.
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The world wisely prefers happiness to wisdom.
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History is mostly guessing; the rest is prejudice.
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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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The failure of the Reformation to capture France had left for Frenchmen no half-way house between infallibility and infidelity; and while the intellect of Germany and England moved leisurely in the lines of religious evolution, the mind of France leaped from the hot faith which had massacred the Huguenots to the cold hostility with which La Mettrie, Helvetius, Holbach, and Diderot turned upon the religion of the fathers.
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That a few simple men should in one generation have invented so powerful and appealing a personality, so lofty ethic, and so inspiring a vision of human brotherhood, would be a miracle far more incredible than any recorded in the Gospels.
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As knowledge grew, fear decreased; men thought less of worshiping the unknown, and more of overcoming it.
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Tolerance grows only when faith loses certainty; certainty is murderous.
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Science tells us how to heal and how to kill; it reduces our death rate in retail and then kills us wholesale in war; but only wisdom - desire coordinated in the light of all experience - can tell us when to heal and when to kill.
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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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There is hardly an absurdity of the past that cannot be found flourishing somewhere in the present.
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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.