Will Durant quotes - page 5

It is a mistake to think that the past is dead. Nothing that has ever happened is quite without influence at this moment. (Will Durant)
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. View quote
Will Durant
The invention and spread of contraceptives is the proximate cause of our changing morals. View quote
Will Durant
I felt more keenly than before the need of a philosophy that would do justice to the infinite vitality of nature. View quote
Will Durant
To speak ill of others is a dishonest way of praising ourselves. View quote
Will Durant
Science is organized knowledge. Wisdom is organized life. View quote
Will Durant
If the average man had had his way there would probably never have been any state. Even today he resents it, classes death with taxes, and yearns for that government which governs least. If he asks for many laws it is only because he is sure that his neighbor needs them; privately he is an unphilosophical anarchist, and thinks laws in his own case superfluous. View quote
Will Durant
The Islamic conquest of India is probably the bloodiest story in history. View quote
Will Durant
All the relations of men and women are being changed by this one factor. View quote
Will Durant
I know how unfashionable it is now to acknowledge in life or history any genius loftier than ourselves. View quote
Will Durant
History has been too often a picture of the bloody stream. The history of civilization is a record of what happened on the banks. (Will Durant)
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. View quote
Will Durant
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. View quote
Will Durant
Nothing should more deeply shame the modern student than the recency and inadequacy of his acquaintance with India. View quote
Will Durant
In the face of warfare and inevitable death, there is no wisdom but in ataraxia, "to look on all things with a mind at peace"." View quote
Will Durant
To speak ill of others is a dishonest way of praising ourselves. Nothing is often a good thing to say, and always a clever thing to say. View quote
Will Durant
I am not against hasty marriages, where a mutual flame is fanned by an adequate income. View quote
Will Durant
II 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. View quote
Will Durant
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 turbulence of change. View quote
Will Durant
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. View quote
Will Durant
The future never just happened. It was created. (Will Durant)
Nothing is new except arrangement. View quote
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. View quote
Will Durant
It came to me that reform should begin at home, and since that day I havenot had time to remake the world. View quote
Will Durant
Friends are helpful not only because they will listen to us, but because they will laugh at us Through them we learn a little objectivity, a little modesty, a little courtesy We learn the rules of life and become better players of the game. View quote
Will Durant