Top 40 Arnold J. Toynbee Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Civilizations die from suicide, not by murder.”

— Arnold J. Toynbee

Featured in: Quotes About Civilization

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

— Arnold J. Toynbee

3. “Nothing fails like success when you rely on it too much.”

— Arnold J. Toynbee

4. “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 that they fail to meet.”

— Arnold J. Toynbee

5. “Civilization is a movement and not a condition, a voyage and not a harbor.”

— Arnold J. Toynbee

6. “History is a vision of God’s creation on the move.”

— Arnold J. Toynbee

7. “It is a paradoxical but profoundly true and important principle of life that the most likely way to reach a goal is to be aiming not at that goal itself but at some more ambitious goal beyond it.”

— Arnold J. Toynbee

8. “Of the twenty-two civilizations that have appeared in history, nineteen of them collapsed when they reached the moral state the United States is in now.”

— Arnold J. Toynbee

9. “Religion holds the solution to all problems of human relationship, whether they are between parents and children or nation and nation. Sooner or later, man has always had to decide whether he worships his own power or the power of God.”

— Arnold J. Toynbee

10. “Apathy can be overcome by enthusiasm, and enthusiasm can only be aroused by two things: first, an ideal, with takes the imagination by storm, and second, a definite intelligible plan for carrying that ideal into practice.”

— Arnold J. Toynbee

11. “The absolute value of love makes life worth while, and so makes Man’s strange and difficult situation acceptable. Love cannot save life from death; but it can fulfill life’s purpose.”

— Arnold J. Toynbee

12. “Immaturity means self-centeredness, inability to compromise, to rise above hurt feelings, to postpone immediate pleasures in favor of future benefits, or to do unpleasant chores when they need to be done.”

— Arnold J. Toynbee

13. “The equation of religion with belief is rather recent.”

— Arnold J. Toynbee

14. “Apathy can be overcome by enthusiasm.”

— Arnold J. Toynbee

15. “The penalty of affluence is that it cuts one off from the common lot, common experience, and common fellowship. In a sense it outlaws one automatically from one’s birthright of membership in the great human family.”

— Arnold J. Toynbee

16. “Write regularly, day in and day out, at whatever times of day you find that you write best. Don’t wait till you feel that you are in the mood. Write, whether you are feeling inclined to write or not.”

— Arnold J. Toynbee

17. “As human beings, we are endowed with freedom of choice, and we cannot shuffle off our responsibility upon the shoulders of God or nature. We must shoulder it ourselves. It is our responsibility.”

— Arnold J. Toynbee

18. “The aim of all education is, or should be, to teach people to educate themselves.”

— Arnold J. Toynbee

19. “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

20. “Angkor is perhaps the greatest of Man’s essays in rectangular architecture that has yet been brought to life.”

— Arnold J. Toynbee

21. “Human dignity can be achieved only in the field of ethics, and ethical achievement is measured by the degree in which our actions are governed by compassion and love, not by greed and aggressiveness.”

— Arnold J. Toynbee

22. “Sooner or later, man has always had to decide whether he worships his own power or the power of God.”

— Arnold J. Toynbee

23. “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

24. “Adversity in the things of this world opens the door for spiritual salvation.”

— Arnold J. Toynbee

25. “The twentieth century will be chiefly remembered by future generations not as an era of political conflicts or technical inventions, but as an age in which human society dared to think of the welfare of the whole human race as a practical objective.”

— Arnold J. Toynbee

26. “A city that outdistances man’s walking powers is a trap for man.”

— Arnold J. Toynbee

27. “Material power that is not counterbalanced by adequate spiritual power, that is, by love and wisdom, is a curse.”

— Arnold J. Toynbee

28. “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

29. “Man’s true end is to glorify God and to enjoy Him for ever.”

— Arnold J. Toynbee

30. “No being can be what he is unless he is putting his essence into action in his field.”

— Arnold J. Toynbee

31. “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

32. “The extinction of race consciousness as between Muslims is one of the outstanding achievements of Islam, and in the contemporary world there is, as it happens, a crying need for the propagation of this Islamic virtue.”

— Arnold J. Toynbee

33. “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

34. “There is no such thing as gratitude in international politics.”

— Arnold J. Toynbee

35. “America is a large friendly dog in a small room. Every time it wags its tail it knocks over a chair.”

— Arnold J. Toynbee

36. “I do not believe that civilizations have to die because civilization is not an organism. It is a product of wills.”

— Arnold J. Toynbee

37. “The course of human history consists of a series of encounters between individual human beings and God in which each man and woman or child, in turn, is challenged by God to make his free choice between doing God’s will and refusing to do it.”

— Arnold J. Toynbee

38. “Anxiety and conscience are a powerful pair of dynamos. Between them, they have ensured that I shall work hard, but they cannot ensure that one shall work at anything worthwhile.”

— Arnold J. Toynbee

39. “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

40. “My advice to any traveler who is traveling in order to learn would be: ‘Fight tooth and nail to be permitted to travel in what is technically the least efficient way.’”

— Arnold J. Toynbee

41. “The last stage but one of every civilisation, is characterised by the forced political unification of its constituent parts, into a single greater whole.”

— Arnold J. Toynbee

42. “The immense cities lie basking on the beaches of the continent like whales that have taken to the land.”

— Arnold J. Toynbee

43. “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

44. “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