Will Durant Quotes
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India will teach us the tolerance and gentleness of mature mind, understanding spirit and a unifying, pacifying love for all human beings.
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Freedom and equality are naturan born enemies.
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Hunting is now to most of us a game, whose relish seems based upon some mystic remembrance, in the blood, of ancient days when to hunter as well as hunted it was a matter of life and death.
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In its youth a people produce mythology and poetry; in its decadence, philosophy and logic.
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History assures us that civilizations decay quite leisurely.
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In Constantinople, more Christians were slaughtered by Christians in the years 342-343 than by all the persecutions by pagans in the history of Rome.
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By and large the poor have the same impulses as the rich, with only less opportunity or skill to implement them.
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The only real revolution is in the enlightenment of the mind and the improvement of character, the only real emancipation is individual, and the only real revolutionists are philosophers and saints.
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Those who have suffered much become very bitter or very gentle.
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In philosophy, as in politics, the longest distance between two points is a straight line.
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Inquiry is fatal to certainty.
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The love we have in our youth is superficial compared to the love that an old man has for his old wife.
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I feel for all faiths the warm sympathy of one who has come to learn that even the trust in reason is a precarious faith, and that we are all fragments of darkness groping for the sun. I know no more about the ultimates than the simplest urchin in the streets.
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Liberty is a product of order.
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The fear of capitalism has compelled socialism to widen freedom, and the fear of socialism has compelled capitalism to increase equality. East is West and West is East, and soon the twain will meet.
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Cultural creation... begins where chaos and insecurity end.
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There have been only 268 of the past 3,421 years free of war.
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The ego is willing but the machine cannot go on. It's the last thing a man will admit, that his mind ages.
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Knowledge that does not generate achievement is a pale and bloodless thing, unworthy of mankind.
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Art lies in conceiving and designing, not in the actual execution' - this was left for lesser minds.
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Historically the belief in heaven and the belief in utopia are like compensatory buckets in a well: when one goes down the other comes up. When the classic religions decayed, communistic agitation rose in Athens (430 B.C.), and revolution began in Rome (133 B.C.); when these movements failed, resurrection faiths succeeded, culminating in Christianity; when, in our eighteenth century, Christian belief weakened, communism reappeared. In this perspective the future of religion is secure.
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It may be true that you can't fool all the people all the time, but you can fool enough of them to rule a large country.
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It is one of the most culpable oversights of nature that virtue and beauty so often come in separate packages.
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We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.