Will Durant Quotes
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When liberty exceeds intelligence, it begets chaos, which begets dictatorship.
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India was the motherland of our race and Samskrit the mother of Europe 's languages...Mother India is in many ways the mother of us all.
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The most interesting thing in the world is another human being who wonders, suffers and raises the questions that have bothered him to the last day of his life, knowing he will never get the answers.
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Knowledge is the eye of desire and can become the pilot of the soul.
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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 In the end, education, like happiness, is individual, and must come to us from life and from ourselves. There is no way; each pilgrim must make his own path. "Happiness," said Chamfort, "is not easily won; it is hard to find it in ourselves, and impossible to find it elsewhere.
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Who will dare to write a history of human goodness?
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The concentration of wealth is a natural result of this concentration of ability, and regularly recurs in history. The rate of concentration varies (other factors being equal) with the economic freedom permitted by morals and laws.
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The experience of the past lives little doubt that every economic system must sooner or later rely upon some form of the profit motive to stir individuals and groups to productivity. Substitutes like slavery, police supervision, or ideological enthusiasm prove too unproductive, too expensive, or too transient.
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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.
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The trouble with most people is that they think with their hopes or fears or wishes rather than with their minds.
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Peace is an unstable equilibrium, which can be preserved only by acknowledged supremacy or equal power.
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Every form of government tends to perish by excess of its basic principle.
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Read, think well of mankind, go to our libraries and rejoice.
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Forget mistakes. Forget failure. Forget everything except what you're going to do now and do it. Today is your lucky day.
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The laws that Charondas gave to Catana,... A man might divorce his wife, or a wife her husband, said Charondas, but then he or she must not marry anyone younger than the divorced mate.
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War is one of the constants of history, and it has not diminished with civilization or democracy.
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A civilization is born Stoic and dies Epicurean.
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A cat has a reputation to protect. If it had a halo, it would be worn cocked to one side.
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Every vice was once a virtue, and may become respectable again, just as hatred becomes respectable in wartime.
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History offers some consolation by reminding us that sin has flourished in every age.
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India was the motherland of our race, and Sanskrit the mother of Europe's languages: she was the mother of our philosophy; mother, through the Arabs, of much of our mathematics; mother, through the Buddha, of the ideals embodied in Christianity; mother, through the village community, of self-government and democracy. Mother India is in many ways the mother of us all.
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In progressive societies the concentration of wealth may reach a point where the strength of number in the many poor rivals the strength of ability in the few rich; then the unstable equilibrium generates a critical situation, which history has diversely met by legislation redistributing wealth or by revolution distributing poverty.
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Bankers know that history is inflationary and that money is the last thing a wise man will hoard.
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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.