Will Durant Quotes

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

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

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.

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

The family is the nucleus of civilization.

...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.

Nobody loves a policeman until he needs one.

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

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

I was only 44, which is childhood philosophy.

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

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

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

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

All science is a charted ignorance and belongs to Maya.

Make wisdom human to the adolescent mind.

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

Death like style is the removal of rubbish.

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

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

Never mind your happiness do your duty.

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

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

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

Every science begins as philosophy and ends as art.

I'm just trying to grow. That's one thing I told myself is, 'Don't worry about who people say is the best player.'

History is mostly guessing the rest is prejudice.

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

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