Arnold J. Toynbee Quotes

24 Sourced Quotes

The supreme accomplishment is to blur the line between work and play.

Arnold J. Toynbee
The human race's prospects of survival were considerably better when we were defenceless against tigers than they are today when we have become defenceless against ourselves.

Arnold J. Toynbee
History not used is nothing, for all intellectual life is action, like practical life, and if you don't use the stuff – well, it might as well be dead.

Arnold J. Toynbee
Now civilizations, I believe, come to birth and proceed to grow by successfully responding to successive challenges. They break down and go to pieces if and when a challenge confronts them which they fail to meet.

Arnold J. Toynbee
The Truth apprehended by the Subconscious Psyche finds natural expression in Poetry; The Truth apprehended by the Intellect finds natural expression in science..

Arnold J. Toynbee
Our western science is a child of moral virtues; and it must now become the father of further moral virtues if its extraordinary material triumphs in our time are not to bring human history to an abrupt, unpleasant and discreditable end.

Arnold J. Toynbee
Theology, not religion, is the antithesis to science.

Arnold J. Toynbee
No being can be what he is unless he is putting his essence into action in his field.

Arnold J. Toynbee
Love's way of dealing with us is different from conscience's way. Conscience commands; love inspires. What we do out of love, we do because we want to.

Arnold J. Toynbee
Before the close of the seventeenth century our forefathers consciously took their treasure out of religion and reinvested it in natural science.

Arnold J. Toynbee
Huddled together in our little earth we gaze with frightened eyes into the dark universe.

Arnold J. Toynbee
The value of the goal lies in the goal itself; and therefore the goal cannot be attained unless it is pursued for its own sake.

Arnold J. Toynbee
We human beings do have some genuine freedom of choice and therefore some effective control over our own destinies. I am not a determinist. But I also believe that the decisive choice is seldom the latest choice in the series. More often than not, it will turn out to be some choice made relatively far back in the past.

Arnold J. Toynbee
We shall have to share out the fruits of technology among the whole of mankind. The notion that the direct and immediate producers of the fruits of technology have a proprietary right to these fruits will have to be forgotten. After all, who is the producer? Man is a social animal, and the immediate producer has been helped to produce by the whole structure of society, beginning with his own education.

Arnold J. Toynbee
Technology: the invention, manufacture, and use of tools.

Arnold J. Toynbee
So-called racial characteristics are not really racial at all but are due to the historical experiences of the communities in question.

Arnold J. Toynbee
Of the twenty or so civilizations known to modern Western historians, all except our own appear to be dead or moribund, and, when we diagnose each case, in extremis or post mortem, we invariably find that the cause of death has been either War or Class or some combination of the two. To date, these two plagues have been deadly enough, in partnership, to kill off nineteen out of twenty representatives of this recently evolved species of human society; but, up to now, the deadliness of these scourges has had a saving limit.

Arnold J. Toynbee
There is no such thing as gratitude in international politics.

Arnold J. Toynbee
Compassion is the desire that moves the individual self to widen the scope of its self-concern to embrace the whole of the universal self.

Arnold J. Toynbee
… the dogma that History is just "one damned thing after another...."

Arnold J. Toynbee
Civilization, as we know it, is a movement and not a condition, a voyage and not a harbor. No known civilization has ever reached the goal of civilization itself.

Arnold J. Toynbee
Man's true end is to glorify God and to enjoy Him for ever.

Arnold J. Toynbee
We have been God-like in our planned breeding of our domesticated plants and animals, but we have been rabbit-like in our unplanned breeding of ourselves.

Arnold J. Toynbee
On this showing, the nature of the breakdowns of civilizations can be summed up in three points: a failure of creative power in the minority, an answering withdrawal of mimesis on the part of the majority, and a consequent loss of social unity in the society as a whole.

Arnold J. Toynbee