Top 350 Will Durant Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Knowledge is power but only wisdom is liberty.”

— Will Durant

Featured in: Knowledge Quotes, Quotes on Liberty

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

— Will Durant

3. “To give life a meaning, one must have a purpose larger than self.”

— Will Durant

Featured in: Meaning of Life Quotes

4. “A civilization is born Stoic and dies Epicurean.”

— Will Durant

Featured in: Quotes About Civilization

5. “History is always repeating itself, but each time the price goes up.”

— Will Durant

6. “Never mind your happiness; do your duty.”

— Will Durant

7. “Science without philosophy, facts without perspective and valuation, cannot save us from havoc and despair. Science gives us knowledge, but only philosophy can give us wisdom.”

— Will Durant

8. “Education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance.”

— Will Durant

9. “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.”

— Will Durant

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

— Will Durant

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

— Will Durant

12. “We teach more by what we are than by what we teach.”

— Will Durant

13. “Those who know nothing about history are doomed forever to repeat it.”

— Will Durant

14. “We are choked with News and starved of History.”

— Will Durant

15. “Knowledge is the eye of desire and can become the pilot of the soul.”

— Will Durant

16. “The only real revolution is in the enlightenment of the mind and the improvement of character, the only real emancipation is individual, and the only real revolutionaries are philosophers and saints.”

— Will Durant

17. “The health of nations is more important than the wealth of nations.”

— Will Durant

18. “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

19. “Civilization begins with order, grows with liberty and dies with chaos.”

— Will Durant

20. “Nothing is often a good thing to do and always a good thing to say.”

— Will Durant

21. “The political machine triumphs because it is a united minority acting against a divided majority.”

— Will Durant

22. “Sixty years ago I knew everything; now I know nothing; education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance. We teach more by what we are than by what we teach.”

— Will Durant

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

— Will Durant

24. “Rome remained great as long as she had enemies who forced her to unity, vision, and heroism. When she had overcome them all she flourished for a moment and then began to die.”

— Will Durant

25. “Who will dare to write a history of human goodness?”

— Will Durant

26. “The time when you need to do something is when no one else is willing to do it, when people are saying it can’t be done.”

— Will Durant

27. “Christianity did not destroy paganism; it adopted it.”

— Will Durant

28. “Our knowledge is a receding mirage in an expanding desert of ignorance.”

— Will Durant

29. “It may be true that you can’t fool all the people all the time, but you can fool enough of them to rule a large country.”

— Will Durant

30. “When liberty exceeds intelligence, it begets chaos, which begets dictatorship.”

— Will Durant

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

— Will Durant

32. “Philosophy begins when one learns to doubt – particularly to doubt one’s cherished beliefs, one’s dogmas and one’s axioms.”

— Will Durant

33. “The soul of a civilization is its religion, and it dies with its faith.”

— Will Durant

34. “If we have never been amazed by the very fact that we exist, we are squandering the greatest fact of all.”

— Will Durant

35. “No man who is in a hurry is quite civilized.”

— Will Durant

36. “War is one of the constants of history, and it has not diminished with civilization or democracy.”

— Will Durant

37. “Education is the transformation of civilisation.”

— Will Durant

38. “Philosophy is harmonized knowledge making a harmonious life; it is the self-discipline which lifts us to serenity and freedom. Knowledge is power, but only wisdom is liberty.”

— Will Durant

39. “Silence is the beginning of wisdom.”

— Will Durant

40. “Man is an emotional animal, occasionally rational; and through his feelings he can be deceived to his heart’s content.”

— Will Durant

41. “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

42. “Nature smiles at the union of freedom and equality in our utopias. For freedom and equality are sworn and everlasting enemies, and when one prevails the other dies.”

— Will Durant

43. “The greatest question of our time is not communism vs. individualism, not Europe vs. America, not even the East vs. the West; it is whether men can bear to live without God.”

— Will Durant

44. “Most of us spend too much time on the last twenty-four hours and too little on the last six thousand years.”

— Will Durant

45. “As knowledge grew, fear decreased; men thought less of worshiping the unknown, and more of overcoming it.”

— Will Durant

46. “The family is the nucleus of civilization.”

— Will Durant

47. “Peace is war by other means.”

— Will Durant

48. “So I should say that civilizations begin with religion and stoicism: they end with scepticism and unbelief, and the undisciplined pursuit of individual pleasure. A civilization is born stoic and dies epicurean.”

— Will Durant

49. “History is mostly guessing; the rest is prejudice.”

— Will Durant

50. “Knowledge that does not generate achievement is a pale and bloodless thing, unworthy of mankind.”

— Will Durant