Will Durant Quotes
-
To rulers religion, like almost everything else, is a tool of power.
-
To give life a meaning, one must have a purpose larger than self.
-
Our knowledge is a receding mirage in an expanding desert of ignorance.
-
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.
-
There is hardly an absurdity of the past that cannot be found flourishing somewhere in the present.
-
The world wisely prefers happiness to wisdom.
-
If we have never been amazed by the very fact that we exist, we are squandering the greatest fact of all.
-
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.
-
No man who is in a hurry is quite civilized.
-
The political machine triumphs because it is a united minority acting against a divided majority.
-
Education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance.
-
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.
-
A great civilization is not conquered from without, until it has destroyed itself from within. The essential causes of Rome's decline lay in her people, her morals, her class struggle, her failing trade, her bureaucratic despotism, her stifling taxes, her consuming wars.
-
Civilization is social order promoting cultural creation. Four elements constitute it: economic provision, political organization, moral tradition, and the pursuit of knowledge and the arts. It begins where chaos and insecurity end. For when fear is overcome, curiosity and constructiveness are free, and man passes by natural impulse towards the understanding and embellishment of life.
-
Knowledge is power but only wisdom is liberty.
-
It came to me that reform should begin at home, and since that day I have not had time to remake the world.
-
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.
-
As knowledge grew, fear decreased; men thought less of worshiping the unknown, and more of overcoming it.
-
History is mostly guessing; the rest is prejudice.
-
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.
-
For you will sorely miss civilization if it is sacrificed in the turbulence of change.
-
When liberty exceeds intelligence, it begets chaos, which begets dictatorship.
-
Civilization exists by geological consent, subject to change without notice.
-
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.