Will Durant Quotes - Page 7

Wherever men do things, other men will arise who will explain to them how things should be done.

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.

The failure of the Reformation to capture France had left for Frenchmen no half-way house between infallibility and infidelity; and while the intellect of Germany and England moved leisurely in the lines of religious evolution, the mind of France leaped from the hot faith which had massacred the Huguenots to the cold hostility with which La Mettrie, Helvetius, Holbach, and Diderot turned upon the religion of the fathers.

India will teach us the tolerance and gentleness of mature mind, understanding spirit and a unifying, pacifying love for all human beings.

Who will dare to write a history of human goodness?

Power dements even more than it corrupts, lowering the guard of foresight and raising the haste of action.

The fear of capitalism has compelled socialism to widen freedom, and the fear of socialism has compelled capitalism to increase equality. East is West and West is East, and soon the twain will meet.

Hunting is now to most of us a game, whose relish seems based upon some mystic remembrance, in the blood, of ancient days when to hunter as well as hunted it was a matter of life and death.

Art lies in conceiving and designing, not in the actual execution' - this was left for lesser minds.

Civilization is the order and freedom is promoting cultural activity.

The ego is willing but the machine cannot go on. It's the last thing a man will admit, that his mind ages.

As to harmonizing the theory of evolution with the Biblical account of creation, I do not believe it can be done, and I do not see why it should be. The story of Genesis is beautiful, and profoundly significant as symbolism: there is no good reason to torture it into conformity with modern theory.

Woe to him who teaches men faster than they can learn.

What if it is for life's sake that we must die? In truth we are not individuals; and it is because we think ourselves such that death seems unforgivable. We are temporary organs of the race, cells in the body of life; we die and drop away that life may remain young and strong. If we were to live forever, growth would be stifled, and youth would find no room on earth. Death, like style, is the removal of rubbish, the circumcision of the superfluous. In the midst of death life renews itself immortally.

Every vice was once a virtue, and may become respectable again, just as hatred becomes respectable in wartime.

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

Knowledge that does not generate achievement is a pale and bloodless thing, unworthy of mankind.

For you will sorely miss civilization if it is sacrificed in the turbulence of change.

Music and religion are as intimately related as poetry and love; the deepest emotions require for their civilized expression the most emotional of arts.

Education is the transformation of civilisation

A cat has a reputation to protect. If it had a halo, it would be worn cocked to one side.

It is one of the most culpable oversights of nature that virtue and beauty so often come in separate packages.

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.

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

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