Top 350 Will Durant Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “Self Government by extravagance and incompetence brings its own end.”

— Will Durant

152. “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.”

— Will Durant

153. “Make wisdom human to the adolescent mind.”

— Will Durant

154. “There are not many things finer in our murderous species than this noble curiosity, this restless and reckless passion to understand.”

— Will Durant

155. “CIVILIZATION is social order promoting cultural creation. Four elements constitute it: economic provision, political organization, moral traditions, 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

156. “The object of philosophy, therefore, is to perceive unity in diversity, mind in matter, and matter in mind; to find the synthesis in which opposites and contradictions meet and merge; to rise to that highest knowledge of universal unity which is the intellectual equivalent of the love of God.”

— Will Durant

157. “Until our states become members of a large and effectively protective group they will continue to act like individuals and families in the hunting stage.”

— Will Durant

158. “When a band of flute players attempted a musical concert at a triumph in 167, the audience forced the musicians to change their performance into a boxing match.15 In the widening middle classes commercialism.”

— Will Durant

159. “Nobody loves a policeman until he needs one.”

— Will Durant

160. “I thank God,” he used to say, “that I was born Greek and not barbarian, freeman and not slave, man and not woman; but above all, that I was born in the age of.”

— Will Durant

161. “If you wish to converse with me,” said Voltaire, “define your terms.” How many a debate would have been deflated into a paragraph if the disputants had dared to define their terms! This is the alpha and omega of logic, the heart and soul of it, that every important term in serious discourse shall be subjected to strictest scrutiny and definition. It is difficult, and ruthlessly tests the mind; but once done it is half of any task.”

— Will Durant

162. “Our knowledge of any past event is always incomplete, probably inaccurate, beclouded by ambivalent evidence and biased historians, and perhaps distorted by our own patriotic or religious partisanship. “Most history is guessing, and the rest is prejudice.”

— Will Durant

163. “Time sanctifies everything; even the most arrant theft in the hands of the robber’s grandchildren becomes sacred and inviolable property.”

— Will Durant

164. “Most history is guessing, and the rest is prejudice.”

— Will Durant

165. “Fundamentalism is the triumph of Paul over Christ.”

— Will Durant

166. “As long as there is poverty there will be gods.”

— Will Durant

167. “Music and religion are as intimately related as poetry and love; the deepest emotions require for their civilized expression the most emotional of arts.”

— Will Durant

168. “THERE IS A PLEASURE in philosophy, and a lure even in the mirages of metaphysics, which every student feels until the coarse necessities of physical existence drag him from the heights of thought into the mart of economic strife and gain.”

— Will Durant

169. “There is no humorist like history.”

— Will Durant

170. “The first form of culture is agriculture. It is when man settles down to till the soil and lay up provisions for the uncertain future that he finds time and reason to be civilized.”

— Will Durant

171. “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.”

— Will Durant

172. “Only a philosopher can be happy in marriage, and philosophers do not marry.”

— Will Durant

173. “Man became free when he recognized that he was subject to law.”

— Will Durant

174. “Hence the uselessness of logic: no one ever convinced anybody by logic; and even logicians use logic only as a source of income. To convince a man, you must appeal to his self-interest, his desires, his will.”

— Will Durant

175. “If you look at a map of Europe you will observe that Greece is a skeleton-like hand stretching its crooked fingers out into the Mediterranean Sea.”

— Will Durant

176. “Utopias of equality are biologically doomed, and the best that the amiable philosopher can hope for is an approximate equality of legal justice and educational opportunity. A.”

— Will Durant

177. “Inequality is not only natural and inborn, it grows with the complexity of civilization. Hereditary inequalities breed social and artificial inequalities; every invention or discovery is made or seized by the exceptional individual, and makes the strong stronger, the weak relatively weaker, than before. Economic development specializes functions, differentiates abilities, and makes men unequally valuable to their group.”

— Will Durant

178. “Pessimism is a sign of decay, optimism is a sign of superficiality; “tragic optimism” is the mood of the strong man who seeks intensity and extent of experience, even at the cost of woe, and is delighted to find that strife is the law of life.”

— Will Durant

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

— Will Durant

180. “Paul created a theology of which none but the vaguest warrants can be found in the words of Christ.”

— Will Durant

181. “Progress is the domination of chaos by mind and purpose, of matter by form and will. It need not be continuous to be real.”

— Will Durant

182. “It was his motto that one lived best by the hidden life – bene vixit qui bene latuit.”

— Will Durant

183. “The Roman Republic would soon be destroyed by the unfettered energy of its great men. The redeeming feature of this aristocracy and.”

— Will Durant

184. “The tragedy of life is that it gives us wisdom only when it has stolen youth. Si jeunesse savait, et vieillesse pouvait! – “If youth knew how, and old age could!”

— Will Durant

185. “In short, Aristotle destroys the soul in order to give it immortality; the immortal soul is “pure thought,” undefiled with reality, just as Aristotle’s God is pure activity, undefiled with action. Let him who can, be comforted with this theology. One wonders sometimes whether this metaphysical eating of one’s cake and keeping it is not Aristotle’s subtle Way of saving himself from anti-Macedonian hemlock?”

— Will Durant

186. “That a few simple men should in one generation have invented so powerful and appealing a personality, so lofty ethic, and so inspiring a vision of human brotherhood, would be a miracle far more incredible than any recorded in the Gospels.”

— Will Durant

187. “Freedom and equality are naturan born enemies.”

— Will Durant

188. “Radicalism is a luxury of stability; we may dare to change things only when things lie steady under our hands.”

— Will Durant

189. “So the conservative who resists change is as valuable as the radical who proposes it – perhaps as much more valuable as roots are more vital than grafts.”

— Will Durant

190. “Plato’s reduction of political evolution to a sequence of monarchy, aristocracy, democracy, and dictatorship found another illustration in the history of Rome.”

— Will Durant

191. “If man asks for many laws it is only because he is sure that his neighbor needs them; privately he is an unphilosophical anarchist, and thinks laws in his own case superfluous.”

— Will Durant

192. “The great snare of thought is uncritical acceptance of irrational assumptions.”

— Will Durant

193. “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

194. “In its youth a people produce mythology and poetry; in its decadence, philosophy and logic.”

— Will Durant

195. “Can a civilization hold together if man abandons his faith in God?”

— Will Durant

196. “It is not the race that makes the civilization, it is the civilization that makes the people: circumstances geographical, economic, and political create a culture, and the culture creates a human type.”

— Will Durant

197. “A sense of humor, being born of perspective, bears a near kinship to philosophy; each is the soul of the other.”

— Will Durant

198. “When Zeno, who did not believe in slavery, was beating his slave for some offense, the slave pleaded, in mitigation, that by his master’s philosophy he had been destined from all eternity to commit this fault; to which Zeno replied, with the calm of a sage, that on the same philosophy he, Zeno, had been destined to beat him for it.”

— Will Durant

199. “Morality, like art, is the achievement of unity in diversity; the highest type of man is he who effectively unites in himself the widest variety, complexity, and completeness of life.”

— Will Durant

200. “For barbarism is always around civilization, amid it and beneath it, ready to engulf it by arms, or mass migration, or unchecked fertility. Barbarism is like the jungle; it never admits its defeat; it waits patiently for centuries to recover the territory it has lost.”

— Will Durant