Quotes from Will Durant

The trouble with most people is that they think with their hopes or fears or wishes, rather than their minds.

Tired mothers find that spanking takes less time than reasoning and penetrates sooner to the seat of the memory.

Science is organized knowledge. Wisdom is organized life.

Education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance.

Excellence is an art won by training and habituation. We do not act rightly because we have virtue or excellence, but we rather have those because we have acted rightly. We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.

To speak ill of others is a dishonest way of praising ourselves. . . let us be above such transparent egotism.

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

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

Tolerance grows only when faith loses certainty; certainty is murderous.

Those who have suffered much become very bitter or very gentle.

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

History reports that the men who can manage men manage the men who can manage only things, and the men who can manage money manage all.

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 light rather than a fire, whose haven is not power but truth: these are the men of wisdom, who stand aside unused by the world.

you can't fool all the people all the time," but you can fool enough of them to rule a large country.

A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself within

Civilization exists by geological consent, subject to change without notice.

When liberty exceeds intelligence, it begets chaos, which begets dictatorship.

The trouble with most people is that they think with their hopes or fears or wishes rather than with their minds.

The greatest question of our time is not communism vs. individualism, not Europe vs. America, not even the East vs. the West; it is whether men can bear to live without God.

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

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 diversely met by legislation redistributing wealth or by revolution distributing poverty.

Rome remained great as long as she had enemies who forced her to unity, vision, and heroism. When she had overcome them all she flourished for a moment and then began to die.

So the story of man runs in a dreary circle, because he is not yet master of the earth that holds him.

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.