Will Durant Quotes

102 Sourced Quotes

Sixty years ago I knew everything. Now I know nothing. Education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance.

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

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

Will Durant
I 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.

Will Durant
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.

Will Durant
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.

Will Durant
Magic begins in superstition and ends in science.

Will Durant
If I were rich I would have many books, and I would pamper myself with bindings bright to the eye and soft to the touch, paper generously opaque, and type such as men designed when printing was very young. I would dress my gods in leather and gold, and burn candles of worship before them at night, and string their names like beads on a string.

Will Durant
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.

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

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

Will Durant
Science is analytical description, philosophy is synthetic interpretation. Science wishes to resolve the whole into the known.

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

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

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

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

Will Durant
So the first biological lesson of history is that life is competition. Competition is not only the life of trade, it is the trade of life — peaceful when food abounds, violent when the mouths outrun the food. Animals eat one another without qualm; civilized men consume one another by due process of law.

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

Will Durant
History smiles at all attempts to force its flow into theoretical patterns or logical grooves; it plays havoc with our generalizations, breaks our rules; history is baroque.

Will Durant
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

Will Durant
In the last analysis civilization is based upon the food supply.

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

Will Durant
A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself 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.

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.

Will Durant
We conclude that the concentration of wealth is natural and inevitable, and is periodically alleviated by violent or peaceable partial redistribution. In this view all economic history is the slow heartbeat of the social organism, a vast systole and diastole of concentrating wealth and compulsive redistribution.

Will Durant