Will Durant Quotes - Page 4

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

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.

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.

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.

Liberty is a luxury of security; the free individual is a product and a mark of civilization.

History offers some consolation by reminding us that sin has flourished in every age.

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.

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

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

History is mostly guessing; the rest is prejudice.

Never put a man in the wrong. He will hold it against you forever.

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

Every form of government tends to perish by excess of its basic principle.

If you wish to be loved, be modest; if you wish to be admired, be proud; if you wish both, combine external modesty with internal pride.

If our economy of freedom fails to distribute wealth as ably as it has created it, the road to dictatorship will be open to any man who can persuasively promise security to all.

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.

Moral codes adjust themselves to environmental conditions.

The dog that buried the bone which even a canine appetite could not manage, the squirrel that gathered nuts for a later feast, the bees that filled the comb with honey, the ants that laid up stores for a rainy day - these were among the first creators of civilization. It was they....who taught our ancestors the art of providing for tomorrow out of the surplus of today, or of preparing for winter in summer's time of plenty.

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

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

If man 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.

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

As soon as liberty is complete it dies in anarchy.

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

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