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It is one of the most culpable oversights of nature that virtue and beauty so often come in separate packages.
Will Durant -
The past is not dead. Indeed, it is often not even past.
Will Durant
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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.
Will Durant -
Nature smiles at the union of freedom and equality in our utopias. For freedom and equality are sworn and everlasting enemies, and when one prevails the other dies.
Will Durant -
As long as there is poverty there will be gods.
Will Durant -
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.
Will Durant -
So the story of man runs in a dreary circle, because he is not yet master of the earth that holds him.
Will Durant -
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.
Will Durant
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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.
Will Durant -
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.
Will Durant -
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.
Will Durant -
The victors called the revolution a triumph of liberty; but now and then liberty in the slogans of the strong means freedom from restraint in the exploitation of the weak.
Will Durant -
I came to think of myself, not as a dance and chaos of molecules, but as a brief and minute portion of that majestic process.
Will Durant -
Civilization begins with order, grows with liberty, and dies with chaos.
Will Durant
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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.
Will Durant -
By and large the poor have the same impulses as the rich, with only less opportunity or skill to implement them.
Will Durant -
Who will dare to write a history of human goodness?
Will Durant -
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.
Will Durant -
In philosophy, as in politics, the longest distance between two points is a straight line.
Will Durant -
India will teach us the tolerance and gentleness of mature mind, understanding spirit and a unifying, pacifying love for all human beings.
Will Durant
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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.
Will Durant -
Art lies in conceiving and designing, not in the actual execution' - this was left for lesser minds.
Will Durant -
History reports that the men who can manage men manage the men who can manage only things, and the men who can manage money manage all.
Will Durant -
The love we have in our youth is superficial compared to the love that an old man has for his old wife.
Will Durant