Top 350 Will Durant Quotes (2024 Update)
Page 5 of 8

201. “The politics of the Essays preach a conservatism natural in one who aspired to rule. Bacon wants a strong central power. Monarchy is the best form of government; and usually the efficiency of a state varies with the concentration of power.”

— Will Durant

202. “If you wish to be loved, be modest; if you wish to be admired, be proud; if you wish both, combine external modesty with internal pride.”

— Will Durant

203. “A cat has a reputation to protect. If it had a halo, it would be worn cocked to one side.”

— Will Durant

204. “We have defined civilization as “social order promoting cultural creation.”67 It is political order secured through custom, morals, and law, and economic order secured through a continuity of production and exchange; it is cultural creation through freedom and facilities for the origination, expression, testing, and fruition of ideas, letters, manners, and arts. It is an intricate and precarious web of human relationships, laboriously built and readily destroyed.”

— Will Durant

205. “For you will sorely miss civilization if it is sacrificed in the turbulence of change.”

— Will Durant

206. “There is hardly an absurdity of the past that cannot be found flourishing somewhere in the present.”

— Will Durant

207. “Often your face is your autobiography.”

— Will Durant

208. “The older Romans used temples as their banks, as we use banks as our temples;.”

— Will Durant

209. “Custom gives the same stability to the group that heredity and instinct give to the species, and habit to the individual. It is the routine that keeps men sane; for if there were no grooves along which thought and action might move with unconscious ease, the mind would be perpetually hesitant, and would soon take refuge in lunacy.”

— Will Durant

210. “The ego is willing but the machine cannot go on. It’s the last thing a man will admit, that his mind ages.”

— Will Durant

211. “The harmony of the part with the whole may be the best definition of health, beauty, truth, wisdom, morality, and happiness. This.”

— Will Durant

212. “History in the large is the conflict of minorities; the majority applauds the victor and supplies the human material of social experiment.”

— Will Durant

213. “Here Ibn Hawqal, about 970, found some 300 mosques, and 300 schoolteachers who were highly regarded by the inhabitants “in spite of the fact,” says the geographer, “that schoolteachers are notorious for their mental deficiency and light brains.”

— Will Durant

214. “Both Stoicism and Epicureanism –. the apathetic acceptance of defeat, and the effort to forget defeat in the arms of pleasure – were theories as to how one might yet be happy though subjugated or enslaved;.”

— Will Durant

215. “So prominent was the Jewish role in the foreign commerce of Europe that those nations that received the Jews gained and the countries that excluded them lost in the volume of international trade.”

— Will Durant

216. “We are living in the excesses of freedom. Just take a look at 42nd Street and Broadway.”

— Will Durant

217. “Our democratic dogma has leveled not only all voters but all leaders; we delight to show that living geniuses are only mediocrities, and that dead ones are myths. If.”

— Will Durant

218. “Never put a man in the wrong. He will hold it against you forever.”

— Will Durant

219. “Men decided that it was better to pay taxes than to fight among themselves; better to pay tribute to one magnificent robber than to bribe them all.”

— Will Durant

220. “One proof of the excellence of this amiable woman’s character is that all who loved her loved each other, even jealousy and rivalry submitting to the more powerful sentiment with which she inspired them; and I never saw any of those who surrounded her entertain the least ill will among themselves. Let the reader pause a moment in this encomium, and if he can recollect any other woman who deserves it, let him attach himself to her if he would obtain happiness.”

— Will Durant

221. “Three meals a day are a highly advanced institution. Savages gorge themselves or fast.”2 The wilder tribes among the American Indians considered it weak-kneed and unseemly to preserve food for the next day.3 The natives of Australia are incapable of any labor whose reward is not immediate; every Hottentot is a gentleman of leisure; and with the Bushmen of Africa it is always “either a feast or a famine.”

— Will Durant

222. “The defect of democracy is its tendency to put mediocrity into power; and there is no way of avoiding this except by limiting office to men of “trained skill.”138 Numbers by themselves cannot produce wisdom, and may give the best favors of office to the grossest flatterers.”

— Will Durant

223. “Traditions and dogmas rub one another down to a minimum in such centers of varied intercourse; where there are a thousand faiths we are apt to become sceptical of them all.”

— Will Durant

224. “Let us trust to ourselves, see all with our own eyes; Let these be our oracles, our tripods and our gods.”

— Will Durant

225. “Pagan professors of philosophy, after the death of Hypatia, sought security in Athens, where non-Christian teaching was still relatively and innocuously free. Student life was still lively there, and enjoyed most of the consolations of higher education – fraternities, distinctive garbs, hazing, and a general hilarity.”

— Will Durant

226. “Read, think well of mankind, go to our libraries and rejoice.”

— Will Durant

227. “Life is that which can hold a purpose for three thousand years and never yield. The individual fails, but life succeeds. The individual is foolish, but life holds in its blood and seed the wisdom of generations. The individual dies, but life, tireless and undiscourageable, goes on, wondering, longing, planning, trying, mounting, longing.”

— Will Durant

228. “Belief in God, said Diderot, is bound up with submission to autocracy; the two rise and fall together; and “men will never be free till the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest.”

— Will Durant

229. “Liberty is a luxury of security; the free individual is a product and a mark of civilization.”

— Will Durant

230. “History offers some consolation by reminding us that sin has flourished in every age.”

— Will Durant

231. “Nothing could be so injurious to health as the Stoic repression of desire; what is the use of prolonging a life which apathy has turned into premature death?”

— Will Durant

232. “Death like style is the removal of rubbish.”

— Will Durant

233. “Protestantism and beer have dulled German wit.”

— Will Durant

234. “Life is that which is discontent, which struggles and seeks, which suffers and creates.”

— Will Durant

235. “They will learn and grow and love and struggle and create, and lift life up one little notch, perhaps, before they die. And when they pass they will cheat death with their children, with parental care that will make their children a little finer than themselves. Life wins.”

— Will Durant

236. “Where there is no strife there is decay:.”

— Will Durant

237. “The individual succumbs, but he does not die if he has left something to mankind.”

— Will Durant

238. “Democracy is a luxury of disseminated intelligence, security, and peace.”

— Will Durant

239. “Perhaps discipline will be restored in our civilization through the military training required by the challenges of war. The freedom of the part varies with the security of the whole; individualism will diminish in America and England as geographical protection ceases. Sexual license may cure itself through its own excess; our unmoored children may live to see order and modesty become fashionable; clothing will be more stimulating than nudity.”

— Will Durant

240. “The form of Christianity that developed in Europe and later spread to America and the rest of the world was the last great creation of the ancient pagan world.”

— Will Durant

241. “We may define human nature as the fundamental tendencies and feelings of mankind.”

— Will Durant

242. “It came to me that reform should begin at home, and since that day I have not had time to remake the world.”

— Will Durant

243. “Seek ye first the good things of the mind,” Bacon admonishes us, “and the rest will either be supplied or its loss will not be felt.”2 Truth will not make us rich, but it will make us free.”

— Will Durant

244. “To seek, beneath the universal strife, the hidden harmony of things.”

— Will Durant

245. “The fear of death is strangely mingled with the longing for repose.”

— Will Durant

246. “When Germany defeated Napoleon it was a disastrous to culture as when Luther defeated the Church.”

— Will Durant

247. “To hate is to acknowledge our inferiority and our fear; we do not hate a foe whom we are confident we can overcome.”

— Will Durant

248. “When those who must do the fighting have the right to decide between war and peace, history will no longer be written in blood.”

— Will Durant

249. “Social evolution is an interplay of custom with origination.”

— Will Durant

250. “These steeples, everywhere pointing upward, ignoring despair and lifting hope – these lofty city spires or simple chapels in the hills – they rise at every step from the earth to the sky; in every village of every nation on the globe they challenge doubt and invite weary hearts to consolation. Is it all a vain delusion? Is there nothing beyond life but death, and nothing beyond death but decay? We cannot know, but as long as men suffer, those steeples will remain.”

— Will Durant