Will Durant Quotes

149 quotes in 1756 categories

• Civilization is social order promoting cultural creation. Four elements constitute it: economic provision, political organization, moral tradition, and the pursuit of knowledge and the arts.…
• Power dements even more than it corrupts, lowering the guard of foresight and raising the haste of action.
• I feel for all faiths the warm sympathy of one who has come to learn that even the trust in reason is a precarious faith,…
• Science gives us knowledge, but only philosophy can give us wisdom.
• Contentment is rare among men as it is natural among animals
• The Islamic conquest of India is probably the bloodiest story in history. It is a discouraging tale, for its evident moral is that civilization is…
• Continue to express your dissent and your needs, but remember to remain civilized, for you will sorely miss civilization if it is sacrified in the…
• To seek, beneath the universal strife, the hidden harmony of things.
• The individual succumbs, but he does not die if he has left something to mankind.
• The laws that Charondas gave to Catana,... A man might divorce his wife, or a wife her husband, said Charondas, but then he or she…
• Cultivate your gardenÂ… Do not depend upon teachers to educate you Â… follow your own bent, pursue your curiosity bravely, express yourself, make your own…
• Cultural creation... begins where chaos and insecurity end.
• Art lies in conceiving and designing, not in the actual execution' - this was left for lesser minds.
• The world wisely prefers happiness to wisdom.
• 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…
• The love we have in our youth is superficial compared to the love that an old man has for his old wife.
• There have been only 268 of the past 3,421 years free of war.
• 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…
• Tired mothers find that spanking takes less time than reasoning and penetrates sooner to the seat of the memory.
• When liberty becomes license, dictatorship is near.

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