Will Durant Quotes
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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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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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Our knowledge is a receding mirage in an expanding desert of ignorance.
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Fundamentalism is the triumph of Paul over Christ.
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Education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance.
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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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History is mostly guessing; the rest is prejudice.
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The political machine triumphs because it is a united minority acting against a divided majority.
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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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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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To give life a meaning, one must have a purpose larger than self.
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The world wisely prefers happiness to wisdom.
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As long as there is poverty there will be gods.
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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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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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As knowledge grew, fear decreased; men thought less of worshiping the unknown, and more of overcoming it.
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When liberty exceeds intelligence, it begets chaos, which begets dictatorship.
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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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To say nothing, especially when speaking, is half the art of diplomacy.
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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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If I were rich I would have many books, and I would pamper myself with bindings bright to the eye and soft to the touch, paper generously opaque, and type such as men designed when printing was very young. I would dress my gods in leather and gold, and burn candles of worship before them at night, and string their names like beads on a string.
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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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For you will sorely miss civilization if it is sacrificed in the turbulence of change.
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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.