Best 211 quotes of Will Durant on MyQuotes

Will Durant

  • By Anonym
    Will Durant

    A civilization is born Stoic and dies Epicurean.

  • By Anonym
    Will Durant

    A great civilization is not conquered from without, until it has destroyed itself from within. The essential causes of Rome's decline lay in her people, her morals, her class struggle, her failing trade, her bureaucratic despotism, her stifling taxes, her consuming wars.

  • By Anonym
    Will Durant

    A history of civilization shares the presumptuousness of every philosophical enterprise: it offers the ridiculous spectacle of a fragment expounding the whole. Like philosophy, such a venture has no rational excuse, and is at best but a brave stupidity; but let us hope that, like philosophy, it will always lure some rash spirits into its fatal depths.

  • By Anonym
    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.

  • By Anonym
    Will Durant

    All that is good in our history is gathered in libraries. At this moment, Plato is down there at the library waiting for us. So is Aristotle. Spinoza is there and so is Kats. Shelly and Byron adn Sam Johnson are there waiting to tell us their magnificent stories. All you have to do is walk in the library door and the great company open their arms to you. They are so happy to see you that they come out with you into the street and to your home. And they do what hardly any friend will-- they are silent when you wish to think.

  • By Anonym
    Will Durant

    And last are the few whose delight is in meditation and understanding; who yearn not for goods, nor for victory, but for knowledge; who leave both market and battlefield to lose themselves in the quiet clarity of secluded thought; whose will is a light rather than a fire, whose haven is not power but truth: these are the men of wisdom, who stand aside unused by the world.

  • By Anonym
    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.

  • By Anonym
    Will Durant

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

  • By Anonym
    Will Durant

    As soon as liberty is complete it dies in anarchy.

  • By Anonym
    Will Durant

    As to harmonizing the theory of evolution with the Biblical account of creation, I do not believe it can be done, and I do not see why it should be. The story of Genesis is beautiful, and profoundly significant as symbolism: there is no good reason to torture it into conformity with modern theory.

  • By Anonym
    Will Durant

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

  • By Anonym
    Will Durant

    Caesar's armies marched on vegetarian foods.

  • By Anonym
    Will Durant

    Can a civilization hold together if man abandons his faith in God?

  • By Anonym
    Will Durant

    Christianity did not destroy paganism; it adopted it.

  • By Anonym
    Will Durant

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

  • By Anonym
    Will Durant

    Civilization exists by geological consent, subject to change without notice.

  • By Anonym
    Will Durant

    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.

  • By Anonym
    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.

  • By Anonym
    Will Durant

    Civilization is social order promoting cultural creation. Four elements constitute it: economic provision, political organization, moral tradition, and the pursuit of knowledge and the arts. It begins where chaos and insecurity end. For when fear is overcome, curiosity and constructiveness are free, and man passes by natural impulse towards the understanding and embellishment of life.

  • By Anonym
    Will Durant

    Civilization is the order and freedom is promoting cultural activity.

  • By Anonym
    Will Durant

    Civilizaton is the interval between Ice Ages.

  • By Anonym
    Will Durant

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

  • By Anonym
    Will Durant

    Communism is the opiate of the people.

  • By Anonym
    Will Durant

    Contentment is rare among men as it is natural among animals

  • By Anonym
    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.

  • By Anonym
    Will Durant

    Cultivate your garden… Do not depend upon teachers to educate you … follow your own bent, pursue your curiosity bravely, express yourself, make your own harmony… In the end, education, like happiness, is individual, and must come to us from life and from ourselves. There is no way; each pilgrim must make his own path. "Happiness," said Chamfort, "is not easily won; it is hard to find it in ourselves, and impossible to find it elsewhere.

  • By Anonym
    Will Durant

    Cultivate your garden. Do not depend upon teachers to educate you... follow your own bent, pursue your curiosity bravely, express yourself, make your own harmony.

  • By Anonym
    Will Durant

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

  • By Anonym
    Will Durant

    Destroy it. There may be a redistribution of the land, but the natural inequality of men soon re-creates an inequality of possessions and privileges, and raises to power a new minority with essentially the same instincts as the old.

  • By Anonym
    Will Durant

    Does history warrant the conclusion that religion is necessary to morality - that a natural ethic is too weak to withstand the savagery that lurks under civilization and emerges in our dreams, crimes and wars? ... There is no significant example in history, before our time, of a society successfully maintaining moral life without the aid of religion.

  • By Anonym
    Will Durant

    Drunkenness was in good repute in England till "Bloody Mary" frowned upon it; it remained popular in Germany. The French drank more stably, not being quite so cold.

  • By Anonym
    Will Durant

    Education is the transmission of civilization.

  • By Anonym
    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.

  • By Anonym
    Will Durant

    Every form of government tends to perish by excess of its basic principle.

  • By Anonym
    Will Durant

    Every science begins as philosophy and ends as art; it arises in hypothesis and flows into achievement.

  • By Anonym
    Will Durant

    Every state begins in compulsion; but the habits of obedience become the content of conscience, and soon every citizen thrills with loyalty to the flag. The citizen is right; for however the state begins, it soon becomes an indispensable prop to order.

  • By Anonym
    Will Durant

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

  • By Anonym
    Will Durant

    Forced to choose, the poor, like the rich, love money more than political liberty; and the only political freedom capable of enduring is one that is so pruned as to keep the rich from denuding the poor by ability or subtlety and the poor from robbing the rich by violence or votes.

  • By Anonym
    Will Durant

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

  • By Anonym
    Will Durant

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

  • By Anonym
    Will Durant

    Freedom and equality are naturan born enemies.

  • By Anonym
    Will Durant

    Friends are helpful not only because they will listen to us, but because they will laugh at us; Through them we learn a little objectivity, a little modesty, a little courtesy; We learn the rules of life and become better players of the game

  • By Anonym
    Will Durant

    From barbarism to civilization requires a century; from civilization to barbarism needs but a day.

  • By Anonym
    Will Durant

    Grow strong, my comrade … that you may stand Unshaken when I fall; that I may know The shattered fragments of my song will come At last to finer melody in you; That I may tell my heart that you begin Where passing I leave off, and fathom more.

  • By Anonym
    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.

  • By Anonym
    Will Durant

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

  • By Anonym
    Will Durant

    History is mostly guessing; the rest is prejudice.

  • By Anonym
    Will Durant

    History is so indifferently rich, that a case for almost any conclusion from it can be made by a selection of instances.

  • By Anonym
    Will Durant

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

  • By Anonym
    Will Durant

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