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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“To say nothing, especially when speaking, is half the art of diplomacy.”

“There have been only 268 of the past 3,421 years free of war.”

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

“Nature has never read the Declaration of Independence. It continues to make us unequal.”

“There is no greater drama in human record than the sight of a few Christians, scorned or oppressed by a succession of emperors, bearing all trials with a fierce tenacity, multiplying quietly, building order while their enemies generated chaos, fighting the sword with the word, brutality with hope, and at last defeating the strongest state that history has known. Caesar and Christ had met in the arena, and Christ had won.”

“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.”

“In all things I saw the passion of life for growth and greatness, the drama of everlasting creation. I came to think of myself, not as a dance and chaos of molecules, but as a brief and minute portion of that majestic process... I became almost reconciled to mortality, knowing that my spirit would survive me enshrined in a fairer mold... and that my little worth would somehow be preserved in the heritage of men. In a measure the Great Sadness was lifted from me, and, where I had seen omnipresent death, I saw now everywhere the pageant and triumph of life.”

“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, and that we are all fragments of darkness groping for the sun. I know no more about the ultimates than the simplest urchin in the streets.”

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

“History is mostly guessing, the rest is prejudice.”

“In the end, nothing is lost. Every event, for good or evil, has effects forever.”

“One of the lessons of history is that the gods can be silent in many languages.”

“But the new generation had tasted the wine of philosophy; and from this time onward the rich youth of Rome went eagerly to Athens and Rhodes to exchange their oldest faith for the newest doubts.”

“but now and then liberty, in the slogans of the strong, means freedom from restraint in the exploitation of the weak.”

“Rome remained great as long as she had enemies who forced her to unity, vision, and heroism. When she had overcome them all she flourished for a moment and then began to die.”

“So the story of man runs in a dreary circle, because he is not yet master of the earth that holds him.”

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

“All that is good in our history is gathered in libraries. At this moment, Plato is down there at the library waiting for us. So is Aristotle. Spinoza is there and so is Kats. Shelly and Byron adn Sam Johnson are there waiting to tell us their magnificent stories. All you have to do is walk in the library door and the great company open their arms to you. They are so happy to see you that they come out with you into the street and to your home. And they do what hardly any friend will-- they are silent when you wish to think.”

“Our knowledge is a receding mirage in an expanding desert of ignorance.”

“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. 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, Story of Civilization, pg 1, vol. 1)”

“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, therefore, is not an act, but a habit.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Excellence is an art won by training and habituation. We do not act rightly because we have virtue or excellence, but we rather have those because we have acted rightly. We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.”

“لقد قال فولتير إذا كنت ترغب في التحدث معي عرّف ما تقول وحدد قولك. كم من نقاش قد ينكمش ويتحول إلى مقطع لو تجرأ المتناقشون على تحديد عباراتهم وجملهم، هذا هو الأول والآخر في المنطق، وقلبه وروحه، بأن تخضع كل عبارة هامة في حديث جدي إلى أشد أنواع التعريف والتحديد والفحص. إنها طريقة صعبة، وامتحان لا رحمة فيه للعقل”

“The past is not dead. Indeed, it is often not even past.”

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

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

“by and large the poor have the same impulses as the rich, with only less opportunity or skill to implement them”

“When liberty exceeds intelligence, it begets chaos, which begets dictatorship.”

“Grow strong, my comrade … that you may standUnshaken when I fall; that I may knowThe shattered fragments of my song will comeAt last to finer melody in you;That I may tell my heart that you beginWhere passing I leave off, and fathom more.”

“Perhaps the cause of our contemporary pessimism is our tendency to view history as a turbulent stream of conflicts – between individuals in economic life, between groups in politics, between creeds in religion, between states in war. This is the more dramatic side of history; it captures the eye of the historian and the interest of the reader. But if we turn from that Mississippi of strife, hot with hate and dark with blood, to look upon the banks of the stream, we find quieter but more inspiring scenes: women rearing children, men building homes, peasants drawing food from the soil, artisans making the conveniences of life, statesmen sometimes organizing peace instead of war, teachers forming savages into citizens, musicians taming our hearts with harmony and rhythm, scientists patiently accumulating knowledge, philosophers groping for truth, saints suggesting the wisdom of love. History has been too often a picture of the bloody stream. The history of civilization is a record of what happened on the banks.”

“Those who have suffered much become very bitter or very gentle.”

“Every science begins as philosophy and ends as art; it arises in hypothesis and flows into achievement.”

“Tolerance grows only when faith loses certainty; certainty is murderous.”

“Sixty years ago I knew everything; now I know nothing; education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance.”

“Civilization exists by geological consent, subject to change without notice. ”

“The greatest question of our time is not communism vs. individualism, not Europe vs. America, not even the East vs. the West; it is whether men can bear to live without God.”

“How much more suffering is caused by the thought of death than by death itself.”

“Education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance.”

“We have here the fundamental problem of ethics, the crux of the theory of moral conduct. What is justice? -shall we seek righteousness, or shall we seek power? -is it better to be good, or to be strong?”

“Science is organized knowledge. Wisdom is organized life.”

“To speak ill of others is a dishonest way of praising ourselves. . . let us be above such transparent egotism.”