Will Durant quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Will Durant

Will Durant Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Will Durant on Wise Famous Quotes.

Most history is guessing, and the rest is prejudice.

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.

[I]ndeed, one hears, in early Christian theology, as many echoes of Persian dualism as of Hebrew Puritanism or Greek philosophy.

Christianity did not destroy paganism; it adopted it.

When liberty destroys order, the hunger for order will destroy liberty.

Protestantism and beer have dulled German wit.

Science is organized knowledge. Wisdom is organized life.

[V]irtue is not news, and virtuous men, like happy nations, have no history.

the fine or composition-money for killing a king was 30,000 thrimsas ($13,000);

It came to me that reform should begin at home, and since that day I have not had time to remake the world.

Let us trust to ourselves, see all with our own eyes; Let these be our oracles, our tripods and our gods.

If ideas do not determine history, inventions do; and inventions are determined by ideas.

Peace is war by other means.

To rulers religion, like almost everything else, is a tool of power.

[H]istory assures us that civilizations decay quite leisurely.

The Roman Republic would soon be destroyed by the unfettered energy of its great men. The redeeming feature of this aristocracy and

As long as there is poverty there will be gods.

No man is educated for statesmanship who cannot see his time from the perspective of the past.

Bankers know that history is inflationary and that money is the last thing a wise man will hoard.

Prudens quaestio dimidium scientiae - to know what to ask is already to know half.

As knowledge grew, fear decreased; men thought less of worshiping the unknown, and more of overcoming it.

Education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance.

[S]hame is a child of custom rather than of nature.

Tolerance grows only when faith loses certainty; certainty is murderous.

Never put a man in the wrong. He will hold it against you forever.

Moral codes adjust themselves to environmental conditions.

When liberty exceeds intelligence, it begets chaos, which begets dictatorship.

Man is an emotional animal, occasionally rational; and through his feelings he can be deceived to his heart's content.

As soon as liberty is complete it dies in anarchy.

History is always repeating itself, but each time the price goes up.

Wherever men do things, other men will arise who will explain to them how things should be done.

Those who know nothing about history are doomed forever to repeat it.

By and large the poor have the same impulses as the rich, with only less opportunity or skill to implement them

Every vice was once a virtue, and may become respectable again, just as hatred becomes respectable in wartime.

One of the lessons of history is that the gods can be silent in many languages.

Philosophy begins when one learns to doubt - particularly to doubt one's cherished beliefs, one's dogmas and one's axioms.

Who will dare to write a history of human goodness?

He who steals from a citizen," said Cato, "ends his days in fetters and chains; but he who steals from the community ends them in purple and gold."17

It was his motto that one lived best by the hidden life - bene vixit qui bene latuit.

In the end, nothing is lost. Every event, for good or evil, has effects forever.

In philosophy all truth is old and only error is original.

For you will sorely miss civilization if it is sacrificed in the turbulence of change.

A cat has a reputation to protect. If it had a halo, it would be worn cocked to one side.

Cultural creation ... begins where chaos and insecurity end.

Nothing is lost in history: sooner or later every creative idea finds opportunity and development, and adds its color to the flame of life.

Our knowledge is a receding mirage in an expanding desert of ignorance.

but trial by combat was unknown.

If we rated greatness by the influence of the great, we will say Muhammad is the greatest of the great in history

How much more suffering is caused by the thought of death than by death itself.

Death like style is the removal of rubbish.

There is no significant example in history, before our time, of a society successfully maintaining moral life without the aid of religion.

The Egyptians enjoyed a great variety of diseases, though they had to die of them without knowing their Greek names.

The ego is willing but the machine cannot go on. It's the last thing a man will admit, that his mind ages.

You can't fool all the people all the time, but you can fool enough of them to rule a large country.

Art lies in conceiving and designing, not in the actual execution' - this was left for lesser minds.

If you wish to be loved, be modest; if you wish to be admired, be proud; if you wish both, combine external modesty with internal pride.

There have been only 268 of the past 3,421 years free of war.

The soul of a civilization is its religion, and it dies with its faith.

versions of Hippocrates' Prognostics, Galen On Foods, and

Paul created a theology of which none but the vaguest warrants can be found in the words of Christ.

Make wisdom human to the adolescent mind.

Says a fine Greek adage, "is the gift of nature; but beautiful living is the gift of wisdom.")

in both cases the desire for knowledge had ended bliss. Sophisticates

Freedom and equality are naturan born enemies.

Liberty is a luxury of security; the free individual is a product and a mark of civilization.

life must breed.

[W]orship, if not the child, is at least
the brother, of fear.

War is one of the constants of history, and it has not diminished with civilization or democracy.

Civilization begins with order, grows with liberty and dies with chaos.

Men who can manage men manage the men who can manage only things.

History is an excellent teacher with few pupils.

Forget mistakes. Forget failure. Forget everything except what you're going to do now and do it. Today is your lucky day

Knowledge is power but only wisdom is liberty.

The love we have in our youth is superficial compared to the love that an old man has for his old wife.

Contentment is rare among men as it is natural among animals

[N]o language has ever had a word for a virgin man.

I was only 44, which is childhood philosophy.

Argos the greatest tragedy in Greek legend was

Communism is the opiate of the people.

To give life a meaning, one must have a purpose larger than self.

Intolerance is the natural concomitant of strong faith; tolerance grows only when faith loses certainty; certainty is murderous. Plato

Civilization is the order and freedom is promoting cultural activity.

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.

This is the tragedy of almost every civilization - that its soul is in its faith, and seldom survives philosophy.

History repeats itself in the large because human nature changes with geological leisureliness.

We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, therefore, is not an act, but a habit.

Facts replaced understanding; and knowledge, split into a thousand isolated fragments, no longer generated wisdom.

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.

By 1911 I found it impossible to continue my pretenses to orthodoxy;

Often your face is your autobiography

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

Economic development specializes functions, differentiates abilities, and makes men unequally valuable to their group.

Which is now a more hopeful statement than Swift intended it to be.

A nation is born stoic, and dies epicurean

The Institutional Church (ecclesia) has killed only two kinds of people: Those who do not believe in the teachings of Jesus Christ, and those who do.

Progress is the increasing control of the environment by life.

Nothing is new except arrangement.

Coarse necessities of physical existence drag him from the heights of thought into the mart of economic strife and gain.

The state is the soul of man enlarged under the microscope of history.

A disintegrating individualism had weakened the Athenian character, and left the city a prey at last to the sternly-nurtured Spartans.