All Quotes by Will Durant
“The trouble with most people is that they think with their hopes or fears or wishes rather than with their minds.”
“Most of us spend too much time on the last twenty-four hours and too little on the last six thousand years.”
“The family is the nucleus of civilization.”
“To say nothing, especially when speaking, is half the art of diplomacy.”
“Sixty years ago I knew everything; now I know nothing; education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance.”
“Bankers know that history is inflationary and that money is the last thing a wise man will hoard.”
“Moral codes adjust themselves to environmental conditions.”
“Sixty years ago I knew everything. Now I know nothing. Education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance.”
“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.”
“Love one another. My final lesson of history is the same as that of Jesus. You may think that's a lot of lollipop but just try it. Love is the most practical thing in the world. If you take an attitude of love toward everybody you meet, you'll eventually get along.”
“To speak ill of others is a dishonest way of praising ourselves; let us be above such transparent egotism. If you can't say good and encouraging things, say nothing. Nothing is often a good thing to do, and always a clever thing to say.”
“Civilization exists by geological consent, subject to change without notice.”
“Moral codes adjust themselves to environmental conditions.”
“Philosophy accepts the hard and hazardous task of dealing with problems not yet open to the methods of science - problems like good and evil, beauty and ugliness, order and freedom, life and death; so soon as a field of inquiry yields knowledge susceptible of exact formulation it is called science.”
“Every science begins as philosophy and ends as art.”
“Philosophy is a hypothetical interpretation of the unknown (as in metaphysics), or of the inexactly known (as in ethics or political philosophy); it is the front trench in the siege of truth.”
“When liberty becomes license, dictatorship is near.”
“Civilization begins with order, grows with liberty, and dies with chaos.”
“It is true that even across the Himalayan barrier India has sent to the west, such gifts as grammar and logic, philosophy and fables, hypnotism and chess, and above all numerals and the decimal system.”
“Education is the transmission of civilization.”
“India will teach us the tolerance and gentleness of mature mind, understanding spirit and a unifying, pacifying love for all human beings.”
“Human progress having reached a high level through respect for the liberty and dignity of men, it has become desirable to re-affirm these evident truths:”
“Rooted in freedom, bonded in the fellowship of danger, sharing everywhere a common human blood, we declare again that all men are brothers, and that mutual tolerance is the price of liberty.”
“The Mohammedan Conquest of India is probably the bloodiest story in history. It is a discouraging tale, for its evident moral is that civilization is a precarious thing, whose delicate complex of order and liberty, culture and peace may at any time be overthrown by barbarians invading from without or multiplying within.”
“It is in the nature of governments to degenerate; for power, as Shelley said, poisons every hand that touches it. The excesses of the Delhi Sultans lost them the support not only of the Hindu population, but of their Moslem followers. When fresh invasions came from the north these Sultans were defeated with the same ease with which they themselves had won India.”
“Nature has never read the Declaration of Independence. It continues to make us unequal.”
“No man who is in a hurry is quite civilized.”
“There is no greater drama in human record than the sight of a few Christians, scorned or oppressed by a succession of emperors, bearing all trials with a fierce tenacity, multiplying quietly, building order while their enemies generated chaos, fighting the sword with the word, brutality with hope, and at last defeating the strongest state that history has known. Caesar and Christ had met in the arena, and Christ had won.”
“A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself within.”
“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.”
“II 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.”
“Power dements even more than it corrupts, lowering the guard of foresight and raising the haste of action.”
“Children and fools speak the truth; and somehow they find happiness in their sincerity.”
“See him, the newborn, dirty but marvelous, ridiculous in actuality, infinite in possibility, capable of that ultimate miracle, growth.”
“Life is that which is discontent, which struggles and seeks, which suffers and creates.”
“Childhood may be defined as the age of play; therefore some children are never young, and some adults are never old.”
“Man is as young as the risks he takes.”
“Happiness is the free play of the instincts, and so is youth.”
“Let us ask the Gods not for possessions, but for things to do; happiness is in making things rather than consuming them.”
“One of the lessons of history is that nothing is often a good thing to do and always a clever thing to say.”
“Youth is learning to read (which is all that one learns in school), and is learning where and how to find what he may later need to know (which is the best of the arts that he acquires in college). Nothing learned from a book is worth anything until it is used and verified in life; only then does it begin to affect behavior and desire. It is Life that educates, and perhaps love more than anything else in life.”
“It is life that educates, and perhaps love more than anything else in life.”
“The principle of the family was mutual aid; but the principle of society is competition, the struggle for existence, the elimination of the weak and the survival of the strong.”
“Here is a fulfillment of long centuries of civilization and culture; here, in romantic love, more than the triumph of thought or the victories of power is the topmost reach of human beings.”
“Wisdom, if it were young, would cherish love, nursing it with devotion, deepening it with sacrifice, vitalizing with parentage, making all things subordinate to it till the end. Even though it consumes us in its service and overwhelms us with tragedy, even though it breaks us down with separations, let it be first. How can it matter what price we pay for love?”
“In my youth I stressed freedom, and in my old age I stress order. I have made the great discovery that liberty is a product of order.”
“Middle age begins with marriage; for then work and responsibility replace carefree play, passion surrenders to the limitations of social order, and poetry yields to prose.”
“As we find a place in the economic world the rebellion of youth subsides; we disapprove of earthquakes when our feet are on the earth. We forget then the radicalism then in a gentle liberalism — which is radicalism softened with the consciousness of a bank account.”
“She is a woman now, and not an idle girl, not a domestic ornament or a sexual convenience anymore.”
“A man is as old as his arteries, and as young as his ideas.”
“Here and everywhere is the struggle for existence, life inextricably enmeshed with war. All life living at the expense of life, every organism eating other organisms forever.”
“The love we have in our youth is superficial compared to the love that an old man has for his old wife.”
“Life is that which can hold a purpose for three thousand years and never yield. The individual fails, but life succeeds. The individual is foolish, but life holds in its blood and seed the wisdom of generations. The individual dies, but life, tireless and undiscourageble, goes on, wondering, longing, planning, trying, mounting, longing.”
“Space, subjectively, is the coexistence of perceptions — perceiving two objects at once.”
“Time, subjectively, is the conscious sequence of perceptions.”
“Knowledge is the eye of desire and can become the pilot of the soul.”
“By mind I mean the totality of perceptions, memories and ideas in an organism.”
“A sensation is the feeling of an external stimulus or an internal condition.”
“There is nothing in socialism that a little age or a little money will not cure.”
“In my youth I stressed freedom, and in my old age I stress order. I have made the great discovery that liberty is a product of order.”
“Tired mothers find that spanking takes less time than reasoning and penetrates sooner to the seat of the memory.”
“We are living in the excesses of freedom. Just take a look at 42nd Street and Broadway.”
“Education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance.”
“History is mostly guessing; the rest is prejudice.”
“There is nothing in socialism that a little age or a little money will not cure.”
“To say nothing, especially when speaking, is half the art of diplomacy.”
“Tired mothers find that spanking takes less time than reasoning and penetrates sooner to the seat of the memory.”
“Science gives us knowledge, but only philosophy can give us wisdom.”
“In my youth I stressed freedom, and in my old age I stress order. I have made the great discovery that liberty is a product of order.”
“Civilization exists by geological consent, subject to change without notice.”