Will Durant Quotes

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

India was the motherland of our race, and Sanskrit the mother of Europe's languages: she was the mother of our philosophy; mother, through the Arabs, of much of our mathematics; mother, through the Buddha, of the ideals embodied in Christianity; mother, through the village community, of self-government and democracy. Mother India is in many ways the mother of us all.

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

A great civilization is not conquered from without, until it has destroyed itself from within. The essential causes of Rome's decline lay in her people, her morals, her class struggle, her failing trade, her bureaucratic despotism, her stifling taxes, her consuming wars.

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

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

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 a precious good, whose delicate complex of order and freedom, culture and peace, can at any moment be overthrown by barbarians invading from without or multiplying within.

The future never just happened. It was created.

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

It is true that even across the Himalayan barrier India has sent to the west, such gifts as grammar and logic, philosophy and fables, hypnotism and chess, and above all numerals and the decimal system.

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

The political machine triumphs because it is a united minority acting against a divided majority.

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.

If we have never been amazed by the very fact that we exist, we are squandering the greatest fact of all.

Love one another. My final lesson of history is the same as that of Jesus. You may think that's a lot of lollipop but just try it. Love is the most practical thing in the world. If you take an attitude of love toward everybody you meet, you'll eventually get along.

Man is an emotional animal, occasionally rational; and through his feelings he can be deceived to his heart's content.

The only real revolution is in the enlightenment of the mind and the improvement of character, the only real emancipation is individual, and the only real revolutionists are philosophers and saints.

Sixty years ago I knew everything. Now I know nothing. Education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance.

The health of nations is more important than the wealth of nations.

Does history warrant the conclusion that religion is necessary to morality - that a natural ethic is too weak to withstand the savagery that lurks under civilization and emerges in our dreams, crimes and wars? ... There is no significant example in history, before our time, of a society successfully maintaining moral life without the aid of religion.

It may be true that you can't fool all the people all the time, but you can fool enough of them to rule a large country.

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

To speak ill of others is a dishonest way of praising ourselves; let us be above such transparent egotism. If you can't say good and encouraging things, say nothing. Nothing is often a good thing to do, and always a clever thing to say.

Education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance.

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

Knowledge is power but only wisdom is liberty.

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

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.

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

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

Cultivate your garden… Do not depend upon teachers to educate you … follow your own bent, pursue your curiosity bravely, express yourself, make your own harmony… In the end, education, like happiness, is individual, and must come to us from life and from ourselves. There is no way; each pilgrim must make his own path. "Happiness," said Chamfort, "is not easily won; it is hard to find it in ourselves, and impossible to find it elsewhere.

Civilizations come and go; they conquer the earth and crumble into dust; but faith survives every desolation.

History is always repeating itself, but each time the price goes up.

Philosophy begins when one learns to doubt -- particularly to doubt one's cherished beliefs, one's dogmas and one's axioms.

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.

From barbarism to civilization requires a century; from civilization to barbarism needs but a day.

Civilization begins with order, grows with liberty, and dies with chaos.

Liberty is a product of order.

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.

Education is the transmission of civilization.

In the last analysis civilization is based upon the food supply.

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

Drunkenness was in good repute in England till "Bloody Mary" frowned upon it; it remained popular in Germany. The French drank more stably, not being quite so cold.

An emperor knows how to govern when poets are free to make verses, people to act plays, historians to tell the truth, ministers to give advice, the poor to grumble at taxes, students to learn lessons aloud, workmen to praise their skill and seek work, people to speak of anything, and old men to find fault with everything.

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

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

We teach more by what we are than by what we teach.

Forced to choose, the poor, like the rich, love money more than political liberty; and the only political freedom capable of enduring is one that is so pruned as to keep the rich from denuding the poor by ability or subtlety and the poor from robbing the rich by violence or votes.

Never mind your happiness; do your duty.

To rulers religion, like almost everything else, is a tool of power.