Top 380 Will Durant Quotes (2026 Update)
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351. “Voltaire learned that he was again on the way to the Bastille. Like a good philosopher, he took to his heels – merely utilizing the occasion to elope with another man’s wife.”

— Will Durant

352. “Our actions, once we initiate them, seem to follow fixed and invariable laws, but only because we perceive their results through sense, which clothes all that it transmits in the dress of that causal law which our minds themselves have made.”

— Will Durant

353. “Death, like style, is the removal of rubbish, the circumcision of the superfluous.”

— Will Durant

354. “Instead of sacking cities and wrecking temples he showed a courteous respect for the deities of the conquered, and contributed to maintain their shrines; even the Babylonians, who had resisted him so long, warmed towards him when they found him preserving their sanctuaries and honoring.”

— Will Durant

355. “A physician or engineer is free in his thoughts or his actions in the degree in which he knows what he deals with. Perhaps we find here the key to any freedom.”

— Will Durant

356. “After 1196 the vigorous merchant-aristocrats of Novgorod dominated the assembly that ruled the principality through its elected prince. The city-state was a free republic, and called itself “My Lord Novgorod the Great.” If.”

— Will Durant

357. “Reason is “man’s imitation of divinity.”

— Will Durant

358. “Some primitive peoples, like the Veddahs of Ceylon, had no dwellings at all, and were content with the earth and the sky; some, like the Tasmanians, slept in hollow trees; some, like the natives of New South Wales, lived in caves; others, like the Bushmen, built here and there a wind-shelter of branches, or, more rarely, drove piles into the soil and covered their tops with moss and twigs.”

— Will Durant

359. “It did not seem to Plato any insult to philosophy that it should be transformed into literature, realized as drama, and beautified with style; nor any derogation to its dignity that it should apply itself, even intelligibly, to living problems of morality and the state.”

— Will Durant

360. “Philosophy directs us first to seek the goods of the mind, and the rest will either be supplied, or not much wanted.”

— Will Durant

361. “To his alert mind and ears, every experience was education.”

— Will Durant

362. “Since practical ability differs from person to person, the majority of such abilities, in nearly all societies, is gathered in a minority of men. The concentration of wealth is a natural result of this concentration of ability, and regularly recurs in history.”

— Will Durant

363. “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. It is good that new ideas should be heard, for the sake of the few that can be used; but it is also good that new ideas should be compelled to go through the mill of objection, opposition, and contumely; this is the trial heat which innovations must survive before being allowed to enter the human race.”

— Will Durant

364. “Rome had freed the Greeks, but on condition that both war and class war should end. Freedom without war was a novel and irksome life for the city-states that made up Hellas; the upper classes yearned to play power politics against neighboring cities, and.”

— Will Durant

365. “A true empiricism is one that sets itself the task of getting as close as possible to the original, of sounding the depths of life, of feeling the pulse of its spirit by a sort of intellectual auscultation”; we “listen in” on the current of life. By direct perception we feel the presence of the mind; by intellectual circumlocution we arrive at the notion that thought is a dance of molecules in the brain. Is there any doubt that intuition here beholds more truly the heart of life?”

— Will Durant

366. “He studied the stars, and guided his caravans across mountains and deserts by tracing his route in the sky.”

— Will Durant

367. “Consequently – since there is a natural selection of institutions and ideas as well as of organisms and groups – the passage from hunting to agriculture brought a change from tribal property to family property; the most economical unit of production became the unit of ownership. As the family took on more and more a patriarchal form, with authority centralized in the oldest male, property became increasingly individualized, and personal bequest arose.”

— Will Durant

368. “Frequently an enterprising individual would leave the family haven, adventure beyond the traditional boundaries, and by hard labor reclaim land from the forest, the jungle or the marsh; such land he guarded jealously as his own, and in the end society recognized his right, and another form of individual property began.”

— Will Durant

369. “The most fortunate of men is he who combines a measure of prosperity with scholarship, research, or contemplation; such a man comes closest to the life of the gods.”

— Will Durant

370. “Our children bring us up by showing us, through imitation, what we really are.”

— Will Durant

371. “In Christ and Peter Christianity was Jewish; in Paul it became half Greek; in Catholicism it became half Roman. In Protestantism the Judaic element and emphasis were restored.”

— Will Durant

372. “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. Leave men free, and their natural inequalities will multiply almost geometrically.”

— Will Durant

373. “Knowledge is of value only as a tool of the good life.”

— Will Durant

374. “Every philosopher should be an athlete. If he is not, let us suspect his philosophy.”

— Will Durant

375. “What is wisdom? It is an application of experience to present problems, a view of the part in the light of the whole, a perspective of the moment in the vista of years past and years to come.”

— Will Durant

376. “The basic principle of democracy is freedom inviting chaos; the basic principle of monarchy is power inviting tyranny, revolution, and war.”

— Will Durant

377. “Education has spread, but intelligence is perpetually retarded by the fertility of the simple. A cynic remarked that “you mustn’t enthrone ignorance just because there is so much of it.” However, ignorance is not long enthroned, for it lends itself to manipulation by the forces that mold public opinion. It may be true, as Lincoln supposed, 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

378. “Intolerance is the natural concomitant of strong faith; tolerance grows only when faith loses certainty; certainty is murderous. Plato.”

— Will Durant

379. “Sometimes,” said Thoreau, “as I drift idly on Walden Pond, I cease to live and begin to be.”

— Will Durant

380. “It is plain, then, that those states are best instituted wherein the middle classes are a larger and more formidable part than either the rich or the poor.”

— Will Durant

381. “A man is as young as the risks he takes.”

— Will Durant

382. “Excepting machinery, there is hardly anything secular in our culture that does not come from Greece. Schools, gymnasiums, arithmetic, geometry, history, rhetoric, physics, biology, anatomy, hygiene, therapy, cosmetics, poetry, music, tragedy, comedy, philosophy, theology, agnosticism, skepticism, stoicism, epicureanism, ethics, politics, idealism, philanthropy, cynicism, tyranny, plutocracy, democracy: these are all Greek words.”

— Will Durant

383. “Let ask the gods not for possessions, but for things to do; happiness is in making things rather than in consuming them.”

— Will Durant

384. “The profoundest defect of the system is its negativity.”

— Will Durant

385. “Life is that which is discontent, which struggles and seeks, which suffers and creates. No mechanistic account or materialistic philosophy can do it justice, or understand the silent growth and majesty of a tree, or compass the longing and laughter of children.”

— Will Durant

386. “To observe processes and construct means is science; to criticize and coordinate ends is philosophy.”

— Will Durant

387. “In philosophy, as in politics, the longest distance between two points is a straight line.”

— Will Durant