Quotes by Will Durant

About Will Durant:

William James Durant is best known for The Story of Civilization, 11 volumes written in collaboration with his wife Ariel Durant and published between 1935 and 1975. He was earlier noted for The Story of Philosophy (1924), described as "a groundbreaking work that helped to popularize philosophy".
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

But the new generation had tasted the wine of philosophy; and from this time onward the rich youth of Rome went eagerly to Athens and Rhodes to exchange their oldest faith for the newest doubts.

Will Durant

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

Will Durant

In my youth I stressed freedom, and in my old age I stress order. I have made the great discovery that liberty is a product of order.

Will Durant

There is nothing in socialism that a little age or a little money will not cure.

Will Durant

...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.

Will Durant

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

Will Durant

Every science begins as philosophy and ends as art.

Will Durant

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

Will Durant

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 dive...

Will Durant

The present is the past rolled up for action, and the past is the present unrolled for understanding.

Will Durant

..we have become wealthy, and wealth is the prelude to art. In every country where centuries of physical effort have accumulated the means for luxury and leisure, culture has followed as naturally as vegetation grows in a rich and watered soil. To ha...

Will Durant

And last are the few whose delight is in meditation and understanding; who yearn not for goods, nor for victory, but for knowledge; who leave both market and battlefield to lose themselves in the quiet clarity of secluded thought; whose will is a lig...

Will Durant

Grow strong, my comrade … that you may stand Unshaken when I fall; that I may know The shattered fragments of my song will come At last to finer melody in you; That I may tell my heart that you begin Where passing I leave off, and fathom more.

Will Durant

If there is any intelligence guiding this universe, philosophy wishes to know and understand it and reverently work with it; if there is none, philosophy wishes to know that also, and face it without fear. If the stars are but transient coagulations ...

Will Durant

There is hardly an absurdity of the past that cannot be found flourishing somewhere in the present. Underneath all civilization, ancient or modern, moved and still moves a sea of magic, superstition and sorcery. Perhaps they will remain when the work...

Will Durant

Civilizations are the generations of the racial soul. As family-rearing, and then writing, bound the generations together, handing down the lore of the dying to the young, so print and commerce and a thousand ways of communication may bind the civili...

Will Durant

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 stupidi...

Will Durant

[N]o language has ever had a word for a virgin man.

Will Durant

The institutions, conventions, customs and laws that make up the complex structure of a society are the work of a hundred centuries and a billion minds; and one mind must not expect to comprehend them in one lifetime, much less in twenty years.

Will Durant

We Americans are the best informed people on earth as to the events of the last twenty-four hours; we are the not the best informed as the events of the last sixty centuries.

Will Durant

Author Bio

  • NameWill Durant
  • DescriptionAmerican historian, philosopher and writer
  • BornNovember 5, 1885
  • DiedNovember 7, 1981
  • CountryUnited States Of America
  • ProfessionHistorian; Writer; Philosopher
  • AwardsPresidential Medal Of Freedom; Pulitzer Prize For General Non-Fiction