87 Quotes & Sayings By Will Durant

And last are the few whose delight is in meditation and understanding; who yearn not for goods, nor for victory, but for knowledge; who leave both market and battlefield to lose themselves in the quiet clarity of secluded thought; whose will is a light rather than a fire, whose haven is not power but truth: these are the men of wisdom, who stand aside unused by the world. Will Durant

Even when repressed, inequality grows; only the man who is below the average in economic ability desires equality; those who are conscious of superior ability desire freedom, and in the end superior ability has its way. Will Durant

[Voltaire] theoretically prefers a republic, but he knows its flaws: it permits factions which, if they do not bring on civil war, at least destroy national unity; it is suited only to small states protected by geographic situation, and as yet unspoiled and untorn with wealth; in general "men are rarely worthy to govern themselves." Republics are transient at best; they are the first form of society, arising from the union of families; the American Indians lived in tribal republics, and Africa is full of such democracies. but differentiation of economic status puts an end to these egalitarian governments; and differentiation is the inevitable accompaniment of development. Will Durant

Hence I think it is that democracies change into aristocracies, and these at length into monarchies, ' people at last prefer tyranny to chaos. Equality of power is an unstable condition; men are by nature unequal; and 'he who seeks equality between unequals seeks an absurdity.' Democracy has still to solve the problem of enlisting the best energies of men while giving to all alike the choice of those, among the trained and fit, by whom they wish to be ruled. Will Durant

The matter of sedition is of two kinds: much poverty and much discontentment.. The causes and motives of sedition are, innovation in religion; taxes; alteration of laws and customs; breaking of privileges; general oppression; advancement of unworthy persons, strangers; dearths; disbanded soldiers; factions grown desperate; and whatsoever in offending people joineth them in a common cause.' The cue of every leader, of course, is to divide his enemies and to unite his friends. 'Generally, the dividing and breaking of all factions..that are adverse to the state, and setting them at a distance, or at least distrust, among themselves, is not one of the worst remedies; for it is a desperate case, if those that hold with the proceeding of the state be full of discord and faction, and those that are against it be entire and united.' A better recipe for the avoidance of revolutions is an equitable distribution of wealth: 'Money is like muck, not good unless it be spread.' But this does not mean socialism, or even democracy; Bacon distrusts the people, who were in his day quite without access to education; 'the lowest of all flatteries is the flattery of the common people;' and 'Phocion took it right, who, being applauded by the multitude, asked, What had he done amiss?' What Bacon wants is first a yeomanry of owning farmers; then an aristocracy for administration; and above all a philosopher-king. 'It is almost without instance that any government was unprosperous under learned governors.' He mentions Seneca, Antonius Pius and Aurelius; it was his hope that to their names posterity would add his own. . Will Durant

No man is educated for statesmanship who cannot see his time from the perspective of the past. Will Durant

Men who can manage men manage the men who can manage only things. Will Durant

History is an excellent teacher with few pupils. Will Durant

It is a mistake to think that the past is dead. Nothing that has ever happened is quite without influence at this moment. The present is merely the past rolled up and concentrated in this second of time. You, too, are your past; often your face is your autobiography; you are what you are because of what you have been; because of your heredity stretching back into forgotten generations; because of every element of environment that has affected you, every man or woman that has met you, every book that you have read, every experience that you have had; all these are accumulated in your memory, your body, your character, your soul. So with a city, a country, and a race; it is its past, and cannot be understood without it. Will Durant

But he had expressed to Mme. du Chatelet the hope that a way out might lie in applying philosophy to history, and endeavoring to trace, beneath the flux of political events, the history of the human mind. 'Only philosophers should write history, ' he said. 'In all nations, history is disfigured by fable, till at last philosophy comes to enlighten man; and when it does finally arrive in the midst of darkness, it finds the human mind so blinded centuries of error, that it can hardly undeceive it; it finds ceremonies, facts and monuments, heaped up to prove lies.' 'History, ' he concludes, 'is after all nothing but a pack of tricks which we play upon the dead;' we transform the past to suit our wishes for the future, and in the upshot 'history proves that anything can be proved by history. . Will Durant

We conclude that the concentration of wealth is natural and inevitable, and is periodically alleviated by violent or peaceable partial redistribution. In this view all economic history is the slow heartbeat of the social organism, a vast systole and diastole of concentrating wealth and compulsive recirculation. Will Durant

[V]irtue is not news, and virtuous men, like happy nations, have no history. Will Durant

[I]ndeed, one hears, in early Christian theology, as many echoes of Persian dualism as of Hebrew Puritanism or Greek philosophy. Will Durant

The story of the "bondage" in Egypt, of the use of the Jews as slaves in great construction enterprises, their rebellion and escape - or emigration - to Asia, has many internal signs of essential truth, mingled, of course, with supernatural interpolations customary in all the historical writings of the ancient East. Will Durant

In some way the god had to be appeased and satisfied; for his worshipers had made him in the image and dream of themselves, and he had no great regard for human life, or womanly tears. Will Durant

A nation is born stoic, and dies epicurean. At its cradle (to repeat a thoughtful adage) religion stands, and philosophy accompanies it to the grave. In the beginning of all cultures a strong religious faith conceals and softens the nature of things, and gives men courage to bear pain and hardship patiently; at every step the gods are with them, and will not let them perish, until they do. Even then a firm faith will explain that it was the sins of the people that turned their gods to an avenging wrath; evil does not destroy faith, but strengthens it. If victory comes, if war is forgotten in security and peace, then wealth grows; the life of the body gives way, in the dominant classes, to the life of the senses and the mind; toil and suffering are replaced by pleasure and ease; science weakens faith even while thought and comfort weaken virility and fortitude. At last men begin to doubt the gods; they mourn the tragedy of knowledge, and seek refuge in every passing delight. Achilles is at the beginning, Epicurus at the end. After David comes Job, and after Job, Ecclesiastes. Will Durant

[S]hame is a child of custom rather than of nature. Will Durant

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

Art is the creation of beauty; it is the expression of thought or feelingin a form that seems beautiful or sublime, and therefore arouses in us some reverberation of that primordial delight which woman gives to man, or man to woman. Will Durant

For what is philosophy but an art - one more attempt to give "significant form" to the chaos of experience? Will Durant

[R]eligion arises not out of sacerdotal invention or chicanery, but out of the persistent wonder, fear, insecurity, hopefulness and loneliness of man. Will Durant

The first source of art, then, is akin to the display of colors and plumage on the male animal in mating time; it lies in the desire to adorn and beautify the body. And just as self-love and mate-love, overflowing, pour out their surplus of affection upon nature, so the impulse to beautify passes from the personal to the external world. The soul seeks to express its feeling in objective ways, through color and form; art really begins when men undertake tobeautify things. Will Durant

Fear of death, wonder at the causes of chance events or unintelligible happenings, hope for divine aid and gratitude for good fortune, cooperated to generate religious belief. Will Durant

[W]orship, if not the child, is at leastthe brother, of fear. Will Durant

The family is the nucleus of civilization. Will Durant

We are tossed about by external causes in many ways, and like waves driven by contrary winds, we waver and are unconscious of the issue and our fate.' We think we are most ourselves when we are most passionate, whereas it is then we are most passive, caught in some ancestral torrent of impulse or feeling, and swept on to a precipitate reaction which meets only part of the situation because without thought only part of a situation can be perceived. Will Durant

The institutions, conventions, customs and laws that make up the complex structure of a society are the work of a hundred centuries and a billion minds; and one mind must not expect to comprehend them in one lifetime, much less in twenty years. Will Durant

.we have become wealthy, and wealth is the prelude to art. In every country where centuries of physical effort have accumulated the means for luxury and leisure, culture has followed as naturally as vegetation grows in a rich and watered soil. To have become wealthy was the first necessity; a people too must live before it can philosophize. No doubt we have grown faster than nations usually have grown; and the disorder of our souls is due to the rapidity of our development. We are like youths disturbed and unbalanced, for a time, by the sudden growth and experiences of puberty. But soon our maturity will come; our minds will catch up with our bodies, our culture with our possessions. Perhaps there are greater souls than Shakespeare's, and greater minds than Plato's, waiting to be born. When we have learned to reverence liberty as well as wealth, we too shall have our Renaissance. Will Durant

...but which of us has read every line of the Iliad, or the Aeneid, or The Divine Comedy, or Paradise Lost? Only men of epic stomach can digest these epic tales. Will Durant

Magic begins in superstition, and ends in science.... At every step the history of civilization teaches us how slight and superficial a structure civilization is, and how precariously it is poised upon the apex of a never-extinct volcano of poor and oppressed barbarism, superstition and ignorance. Modernity is a cap superimposed upon the Middle Ages, which always remain. Will Durant

In progressive societies the concentration[of wealth] may reach a point where the strength of number in the many poor rivals the strength of ability in the few rich; then the unstable equilibrium generates a critical situation, which history has diversely met by legislation redistributing wealth or by revolution distributing poverty. Will Durant

The past is not dead. Indeed, it is often not even past. Will Durant

Nobody loves a policeman until he needs one. Will Durant

The state is the soul of man enlarged under the microscope of history. Will Durant

And again, though we cannot prove, we feel, that we are deathless. We perceive that life is not like those dramas so beloved by the people–in which every villain is punished, and every act of virtue meets with its reward; we learn anew every day that the wisdom of the serpent fares better here than the gentleness of the dove, and that any thief can triumph if he steals enough. If mere worldly utility and expediency were the justification of virtue, it would not be wise to be too good. And yet, knowing all this, having it flung into our faces with brutal repetition, we still feel the command to righteousness, we know that we ought to do the inexpedient good. . Will Durant

So the conservative who resists change is as valuable as the radical who proposes it -- perhaps as much more as the 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. It is good that the old should resist the young, and that the young should prod the old; out of this tension, as out of the strife of the sexes and the classes, comes a creative tensile strength, a stimulated development, a secret and basic unity and movement of the whole. Will Durant

We must steel ourselves against utopias and be content with a slightly better state. Will Durant

I was only 44, which is childhood philosophy. Will Durant

A man is as old as his arteries and as young as his ideas. Will Durant

We are what we repeatedly do. Greatness then, is not an act, but a habit Will Durant

If we rated greatness by the influence of the great, we will say "Muhammad is the greatest of the great in history Will Durant

But now and then liberty, in the slogans of the strong, means freedom from restraint in the exploitation of the weak. Will Durant

All science is a charted ignorance and belongs to Maya. Will Durant

Make wisdom human to the adolescent mind. Will Durant

If there is any intelligence guiding this universe, philosophy wishes to know and understand it and reverently work with it; if there is none, philosophy wishes to know that also, and face it without fear. If the stars are but transient coagulations of haphazard nebulae, if life is a colloidal accident, impersonally permanent and individually fleeting, if man is only a compound of chemicals, destined to disintegrate and utterly disappear, if the creative ecstasy of art, and the gentle wisdom of the sage, and the willing martyrdom of saints are but bright incidents in the protoplasmic pullulation of the earth, and death is the answer to every problem and the destiny of every soul--then philosophy will face that too, and try to find within that narrowed circle some significance and nobility for man. Will Durant

Every civilization is a fruit from the sturdy tree of barbarism, and falls at the greatest distance from its trunk. Will Durant

There is hardly an absurdity of the past that cannot be found flourishing somewhere in the present. Underneath all civilization, ancient or modern, moved and still moves a sea of magic, superstition and sorcery. Perhaps they will remain when the works of our reason have passed away. Will Durant

Civilizations are the generations of the racial soul. As family-rearing, and then writing, bound the generations together, handing down the lore of the dying to the young, so print and commerce and a thousand ways of communication may bind the civilizations together, and preserve for future cultures all that is of value for them in our own. Let us, before we die, gather up our heritage, and offer it to our children. Will Durant

A history of civilization shares the presumptuousness of every philosophical enterprise: it offers the ridiculous spectacle of a fragment expounding the whole. Like philosophy, such a venture has no rational excuse, and is at best but a brave stupidity; but let us hope that, like philosophy, it will always lure some rash spirits into its fatal depths. Will Durant

[N]o language has ever had a word for a virgin man. Will Durant

Grow strong, my comrade … that you may stand Unshaken when I fall; that I may know The shattered fragments of my song will come At last to finer melody in you; That I may tell my heart that you begin Where passing I leave off, and fathom more. Will Durant

Death like style is the removal of rubbish. Will Durant

The trouble with most people is that they think with their hopes or fears or wishes rather than with their minds. Will Durant

Nothing is often a good thing to do and always a good thing to say. Will Durant

The individual succumbs but he does not die if he has left something to mankind. Will Durant

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

Forget mistakes. Forget failure. Forget everything except what you're going to do now and do it. Today is your lucky day. Will Durant

Never mind your happiness do your duty. Will Durant

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

One of the lessons of history is that nothing is often a good thing to do and always a clever thing to say. Will Durant

Our knowledge is a receding mirage in an expanding desert of ignorance. Will Durant

When liberty destroys order the hunger for order will destroy liberty. Will Durant

Tired mothers find that spanking takes less time than reasoning and penetrates sooner to the seat of the memory. Will Durant

Forget mistakes. Forget failures. Forget everything except what you're going to do now and do it. Today is your lucky day. Will Durant

There have been only 268 of the past 3, 421 years free of war. Will Durant

The love we have in our youth is superficial compared to the love that an old man has for his old wife. Will Durant

To say nothing, especially when speaking, is half the art of diplomacy. Will Durant

Nature has never read the Declaration of Independence. It continues to make us unequal. Will Durant

Every science begins as philosophy and ends as art. Will Durant

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

History is mostly guessing the rest is prejudice. Will Durant

Bankers know that history is inflationary and that money is the last thing a wise man will hoard. Will Durant

Knowledge is the eye of desire and can become the pilot of the soul. Will Durant

Science gives us knowledge, but only philosophy can give us wisdom. Will Durant

Truth always originates in a minority of one, and every custom begins as a broken precedent. Will Durant

Every form of government tends to perish by excess of its basic principle. Will Durant

Sixty years ago I knew everything now I know nothing education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance. Will Durant

Moral codes adjust themselves to environmental conditions. Will Durant

Civilization is the order and freedom is promoting cultural activity. Will Durant