Will Durant Quotes

History offers some consolation by reminding us that sin has flourished in every age. ~ Will Durant

Voltaire rejects all systems, and suspects that "every chief of a sect in philosophy has been a little of a quack."

"The further I go, the more I am confirmed in the idea that systems of metaphysics are for philosophers what novels are for women."

"It is only charlatans who are certain. We know nothing of first principles. It is truly extravagant to define God, angels, and minds, and to know precisely why God formed the world, when we do not know why we move our arms at will."

"Doubt is not a very agreeable state, but certainty is a ridiculous one. ~ Will Durant

The principle of democracy is freedom, the principle of war is discipline; each requires the absence of the other. ~ Will Durant

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

The trouble with most people is that they think with their hopes or fears or wishes rather than with their minds. ~ Will Durant

we want to seize the value and perspective of passing things, and so to pull ourselves up out of the maelstrom of daily circumstance. We want to know that the little things are little, and the big things big, before it is too late; we want to see things now as they will seem forever-"in the light of eternity." We want to learn to laugh in the face of the inevitable, to smile even at the looming of death. We want to be whole, to coordinate our energies by criticizing and harmonizing our desires; for coordinated energy: is the last word in ethics and politics, and perhaps in logic and metaphysics too. ~ Will Durant

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

And, after speech, it provided a readier instrument for the dissemination of nonsense than the world has ever known until our time. ~ Will Durant

News, like men, traveled slowly; intelligence of Barbarossa's death in Cilicia took four months to reach Germany.16 Medieval man could eat his breakfast without being disturbed by the industriously collected calamities of the world; or those that came to his ken were fortunately too old for remedy. ~ Will Durant

He had the philosopher's disease of seeing so far ahead that all the little pleasant shapes and colors of existence passed under his nose unseen. ~ Will Durant

Continue to express your dissent and your needs, but remember to remain civilized, for you will sorely miss civilization if it is sacrified in the turbulence of change. ~ Will Durant

A sense of humor, being born of perspective, bears a near kinship to philosophy; each is the soul of the other. ~ Will Durant

The matter of sedition is of two kinds: much poverty and much discontentment....The causes and motives of sedition are, innovation in religion; taxes; alteration of laws and customs; breaking of privileges; general oppression; advancement of unworthy persons, strangers; dearths; disbanded soldiers; factions grown desperate; and whatsoever in offending people joineth them in a common cause.' The cue of every leader, of course, is to divide his enemies and to unite his friends. 'Generally, the dividing and breaking of all factions...that are adverse to the state, and setting them at a distance, or at least distrust, among themselves, is not one of the worst remedies; for it is a desperate case, if those that hold with the proceeding of the state be full of discord and faction, and those that are against it be entire and united.' A better recipe for the avoidance of revolutions is an equitable distribution of wealth: 'Money is like muck, not good unless it be spread.' But this does not mean socialism, or even democracy; Bacon distrusts the people, who were in his day quite without access to education; 'the lowest of all flatteries is the flattery of the common people;' and 'Phocion took it right, who, being applauded by the multitude, asked, What had he done amiss?' What Bacon wants is first a yeomanry of owning farmers; then an aristocracy for administration; and above all a philosopher-king. 'It is almost without instance that any government was unprosperous under learned gove ~ Will Durant

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

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

The decline of religious belief,which has all sorts of effects on morals and even on politics because religion has been a tool of politics. But today in Europe it ceases to be a tool, it has very little influence in determining political decisions - ~ Will Durant

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

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. ~ Will Durant

Even when repressed, inequality grows; only the man who is below the average in economic ability desires equality; those who are conscious of superior ability desire freedom, and in the end superior ability has its way. ~ Will Durant

Self Government by extravagance and incompetence brings its own end. ~ Will Durant

Power dements even more than it corrupts, lowering the guard of foresight and raising the haste of action. ~ Will Durant

When liberty destroys order, the hunger for order will destroy liberty. ~ Will Durant

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. ~ Will Durant

Liberty is a product of order. ~ Will Durant

The illustrious ancients,when they wished to make clear and to propagate the highest virtues in the world, put their states in proper order. Before putting their states in proper order, they regulated their families. Before regulating their families, they cultivated their own selves. Before cultivating their own selves, they perfected their souls. Before perfecting their souls, they tried to be sincere in their thoughts. Before trying to be sincere in their thoughts, they extended to the utmost their knowledge. ~ Will Durant

The older Romans used temples as their banks, as we use banks as our temples; ~ Will Durant

War does one good - it teaches people geography. ~ Will Durant

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

Truth will not make us rich, but it will make us free. ~ Will Durant

The constant steaming in of thoughts of others must suppress and confine our own and indeed in the long run paralyze the power of thought ... The inclination of most scholars is a kind of fuga vacui ( latin for vacuum suction )from the poverty of their own mind , which forcibly draws in the thoughts of others ... It is dangerous to read about a subject before we have thought about it ourselves ... When we read, another person thinks for us; merely repeat his mental process. So it comes about that if anybody spends almost the whole day in reading, he gradually loses the capacity for thinking. Experience of the world may be looked upon as a kind of text, to which reflection and knowledge form the commentary. Where there is a great deal of reflection and intellectual knowledge and very little experience , the result is like those books which have on each page two lines of text to forty lines of commentary ~ Will Durant

The elements of instruction . . . should be presented to the mind in childhood, but not with any compulsion; for a freeman should be a freeman too in the acquisition of knowledge . . . . Knowledge which is acquired under compulsion has no hold on the mind. Therefore do not use compulsion, but let early education be rather a sort of amusement; this will better enable you to find out the natural bent of the child (536). ~ Will Durant

Perhaps there was, in the dim past, a communistic society, when the family was the only state, and pasturage or simple tillage the only form of life. But "in a more divided state of society," where the division of labor into unequally important functions elicits and enlarges the natural inequality of men, communism breaks down because it provides no adequate incentive for the exertion of superior abilities. The stimulus of gain is necessary to arduous work; and the stimulus of ownership is necessary to proper industry, husbandry and care. ~ Will Durant

Men look to love and life for everything; they receive a little less than that; they imagine that they have received nothing: these are the three stages of the pessimist. ~ Will Durant

Centuries of barbarism, insecurity and war had to intervene before man could defile his God with attributes of undying vengeance and inexhaustible cruelty. ~ Will Durant

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

If our economy of freedom fails to distribute wealth as ably as it has created it, the road to dictatorship will be open to any man who can persuasively promise security to all. ~ Will Durant

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. ~ Will Durant

He who leaves his home in search of knowledge walks in the path of God ... and the ink of the scholar is holier than the blood of the martyr; ~ Will Durant

When Zeno, who did not believe in slavery, was beating his slave for some offense, the slave pleaded, in mitigation, that by his master's philosophy he had been destined from all eternity to commit this fault; to which Zeno replied, with the calm of a sage, that on the same philosophy he, Zeno, had been destined to beat him for it. ~ Will Durant

...[A] poor priest, Chandi Das, was shocking Bengal by composing Dantean songs to a peasant Beatrice, ideal­izing her with romantic passion, exalting her as a symbol of divinity, and making his love an allegory of his desire for absorption in God; at the same time he inaugurated the use of Bengali as a literary language. "I have taken refuge at your feet, my beloved. When I do not see you my mind has no rest .... I cannot forget your grace and your charm, - and yet there is no desire in my heart." Excommunicated by his fellow Brahmans on the ground that he was scandalizing the public, he agreed to renounce his love, Rami, in a public ceremony of recantation; but when, in the course of this ritual, he saw Rami in the crowd, he withdrew his recanta­tion, and going up to her, bowed before her with hands joined in adora-
tion. ~ Will Durant

[Herbert Spencer] was ready in those days to give everything a trial; he even thought of migrating to New Zealand, forgetting that a young country has no use for philosophers. It was characteristic of him that he made parallel lists of reasons for and against the move, giving each reason a numerical value. The sums being 110 points for remaining in England and 301 for going, he remained. ~ Will Durant

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

Nothing is new except arrangement. ~ Will Durant

Animals eat one another without qualm; civilized men consume one another by due process of law. Co-operation ~ Will Durant

Civilizations come and go; they conquer the earth and crumble into dust; but faith survives every desolation. ~ Will Durant

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. ~ Will Durant

Men readily listen" to Utopias, "and are easily induced to believe that in some wonderful manner everybody will become everybody's friend, especially when someone is heard denouncing the evils now existing, ... which are said to arise out of the possession of private property. These evils, however, arise from quite another source - the wickedness of human nature. ~ Will Durant

But he had gained a perspective of thought in which every extreme was seen as a half-truth, ~ Will Durant

History is mostly guessing, the rest is prejudice. ~ Will Durant

Most history is guessing, and the rest is prejudice. ~ Will Durant

All deductions having been made, democracy has done less harm, and more good, than any other form of government. It gave to human existence a zest and camaraderie that outweighed its pitfalls and defects. It gave to thought and science and enterprise the freedom essential to their operation and growth. It broke down the walls of privilege and class, and in each generation it raised up ability from every rank and place. ~ Will Durant

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

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

Pagan professors of philosophy, after the death of Hypatia, sought security in Athens, where non-Christian teaching was still relatively and innocuously free. Student life was still lively there, and enjoyed most of the consolations of higher education - fraternities, distinctive garbs, hazing, and a general hilarity. ~ Will Durant

Civilization is not inherited; it has to be learned and earned by each generation anew; if the transmission should be interrupted for one century, civilization would die, and we should be savages again. ~ Will Durant

E have become wealthy, and wealth is the prelude to art. In every country where centuries of physical effort have accumulated the means for luxury and leisure, culture has followed as naturally as vegetation grows in a rich and watered soil. To have become wealthy was the first necessity; a people too must live before it can philosophize. No doubt we have grown faster than nations usually have grown; and the disorder of our souls is due to the rapidity of our development. We are like youths disturbed and unbalanced, for a time, by the sudden growth and experiences of puberty. But soon our maturity will come; our minds will catch up with our bodies, our culture with our possessions. Perhaps there are greater souls than Shakespeare's, and greater minds than Plato's, waiting to be born. When we have learned to reverence liberty as well as wealth, we too shall have our Renaissance. ~ Will Durant

When liberty exceeds intelligence, it begets chaos, which begets dictatorship. ~ Will Durant

Democritus (460-360 B.C.) - in reality there is nothing but atoms and space. ~ Will Durant

Hence the uselessness of logic: no one ever convinced anybody by logic; and even logicians use logic only as a source of income. To convince a man, you must appeal to his self-interest, his desires, his will. ~ Will Durant

Progress is the domination of chaos by mind and purpose, of matter by form and will. It need not be continuous to be real. ~ Will Durant

I thank God," he used to say, "that I was born Greek and not barbarian, freeman and not slave, man and not woman; but above all, that I was born in the age of ~ Will Durant

The first source of art, then, is akin to the display of colors and plumage on the male animal in mating time; it lies in the desire to adorn and beautify the body. And just as self-love and mate-love, overflowing, pour out their surplus of affection upon nature, so the impulse to beautify passes from the personal to the external world. The soul seeks to express its feeling in objective ways, through color and form; art really begins when men undertake to
beautify things. ~ Will Durant

I had rather believe all the fables in the Legend, and the Talmud and the Alcoran, than that this universal frame is without a mind ... A little philosophy inclineth a man's mind to atheism; but depth in philosophy bringeth men's minds about to religion. For while the mind of man looketh upon second causes scattered, it may sometimes rest in them and go no further; but when it beholdeth the chain of them, confederate and linked together, it must needs fly to Providence and Deity. ~ Will Durant

When Germany defeated Napoleon it was a disastrous to culture as when Luther defeated the Church. ~ Will Durant

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

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

In some way the god had to be appeased and satisfied; for his worshipers had made him in the image and dream of themselves, and he had no great regard for human life, or womanly tears. ~ Will Durant

It is one of the most culpable oversights of nature that virtue and beauty so often come in separate packages. ~ Will Durant

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

There his chief enterprises are reading and doing nothing. ~ Will Durant

Cultural creation ... begins where chaos and insecurity end. ~ Will Durant

We frolic in our emancipation from theology, but have we developed a natural ethic - a moral code independent of religion - strong enough to keep our instincts of acquisition, pugnacity, and sex from debasing our civilization into a mire of greed, crime, and promiscuity? Have we really outgrown intolerance, or merely transferred it from religious to national, ideological, or racial hostilities? ~ Will Durant

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

For what is philosophy but an art - one more attempt to give "significant form" to the chaos of experience? ~ Will Durant

We have here the fundamental problem of ethics, the crux of the theory of moral conduct. What is justice? -shall we seek righteousness, or shall we seek power? -is it better to be good, or to be strong? ~ Will Durant

We have conferred a mystic popularity upon officials whose only virtue is their timidity; while our scorn of rebels and reformers is so great that we have ceased to persecute them. The capitals and governments of the world are in the hands of caution; and change comes over them only in the night, unseen. ~ Will Durant

If a man is fortunate he will, before he dies, gather up as much as he can of his civilized heritage and transmit it to his children. ~ Will Durant

[One] of the fundamental principles of statesmanship: to persuade radicals that change must be gradual in order to be permanent, and to persuade conservatives that change must be. ~ Will Durant

Civilization begins with order, grows with liberty and dies with chaos. ~ Will Durant

But before twenty is the joy of the body, and after thirty is the joy of the mind; before twenty is the pleasure of protection and security; and after thirty, the joy of parentage and home. How ~ Will Durant

An emperor knows how to govern when poets are free to make verses, people to act plays, historians to tell the truth, ministers to give advice, the poor to grumble at taxes, students to learn lessons aloud, workmen to praise their skill and seek work, people to speak of anything, and old men to find fault with everything. ~ Will Durant

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. ~ Will Durant

Men who can manage men manage the men who can manage only things. ~ Will Durant

Civilizations are the generations of the racial soul. As family-rearing, and then writing, bound the generations together, handing down the lore of the dying to the young, so print and commerce and a thousand ways of communication may bind the civilizations together, and preserve for future cultures all that is of value for them in our own. Let us, before we die, gather up our heritage, and offer it to our children. ~ Will Durant

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

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

Intellectualism - the conception of man as above all a thinking animal, consciously adapting means to rationally chosen ends - fell sick with Rousseau, took to its bed with Kant, and died with Schopenhauer. ~ Will Durant

Government itself, which is the most unnatural and necessary of social mechanisms, has usually required the support of piety and the priest, as clever heretics like Napoleon and Mussolini soon discovered; and hence a tendency to theocracy is incidental to all constitutions. ~ Will Durant

The fount and breeding-place of the Semites was Arabia. ~ Will Durant

Here Ibn Hawqal, about 970, found some 300 mosques, and 300 schoolteachers who were highly regarded by the inhabitants "in spite of the fact," says the geographer, "that schoolteachers are notorious for their mental deficiency and light brains. ~ Will Durant

The timid weakness of individuals, the insecurity of groups, and the delusion of superiority generated perpetual fear, suspicion, dislike, and contempt of the different, the alien, and the strange. ~ Will Durant

Rome had freed the Greeks, but on condition that both war and class war should end. Freedom without war was a novel and irksome life for the city-states that made up Hellas; the upper classes yearned to play power politics against neighboring cities, and ~ Will Durant

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

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

India was the motherland of our race
and Sanskrit the mother of Europe's languages.
India was the mother of our philosophy,
of much of our mathematics, of the ideals embodied in
Christianity ... of self-government and democracy.
In many ways, Mother India is the mother of us all. ~ Will Durant

When liberty becomes license, dictatorship is near. ~ Will Durant

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

We are choked with News and starved of History. ~ Will Durant

Contentment is rare among men as it is natural among animals ~ 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