Quotes from Will Durant

We are tossed about by external causes in many ways, and like waves driven by contrary winds, we waver and are unconscious of the issue and our fate.' We think we are most ourselves when we are most passionate, whereas it is then we are most passive, caught in some ancestral torrent of impulse or feeling, and swept on to a precipitate reaction which meets only part of the situation because without thought only part of a situation can be perceived.

The great achievement of Kant is to have shown, once for all, that the external world is known to us only as sensation; and that the mind is no mere helpless tabula rasa, the inactive victim of sensation, but a positive agent, selecting and reconstructing experience as experience arrives.

The class war had turned democracy into a contest in legislative looting.

The Roman Republic would soon be destroyed by the unfettered energy of its great men. The redeeming feature of this aristocracy and

when men are friends, justice is unnecessary; but when men are just, friendship is still a boon." "A friend is one soul in two bodies." Yet friendship implies few friends rather than many; "he who has many friends has no friend"; and "to be a friend to many people in the way of perfect friendship is impossible.

only a fool would try to compress a hundred centuries into a hundred pages of hazardous conclusions. We proceed.

one should carry a small candle about the corners of a room radiant with a central light.

Being also a poet, he put Francis Bacon into doggerel: You glorify Nature and meditate on her; Why not domesticate her and regulate her? You obey Nature and sing her praise; Why not control her course and use it?

To hate is to acknowledge our inferiority and our fear; we do not hate a foe whom we are confident we can overcome.

When the Duke of Wei offered him the prime ministry he dismissed the royal messengers with a curtness indicative of a writer's dreams: "Go away quickly, and do not soil me with your presence. I had rather amuse and enjoy myself in a filthy ditch than be subject to the rules and restrictions in the court of a sovereign.

The whole thing [life] is a 'Racket,' so get a few laughs, do the best you can, take nothing serious, for nothing is certainly depending on this generation. Each one lives in spite of the previous one and not because of it. And don't start "seeking knowledge," for the more you seek the nearer the "Booby Hatch" you get.

The gods and myths of Babylon and Nineveh are in many cases modifications or developments of Sumerian theology;

Reason is man's imitation of divinity.

It may be true, as Lincoln supposed, that "you can't fool all the people all the time," but you can fool enough of them to rule a large country. Is

Social evolution is an interplay of custom with origination.

and very broadly, the problem of reducing human misery by modifying social institutions. It is a problem that, ever reshaping itself, eludes sharper definition; for misery is related to desire, and desire is personal and in perpetual flux: each of us

Inequality is not only natural and inborn, it grows with the complexity of civilization. Hereditary inequalities breed social and artificial inequalities; every invention or discovery is made or seized by the exceptional individual, and makes the strong stronger, the weak relatively weaker, than before. Economic development specializes functions, differentiates abilities, and makes men unequally valuable to their group.

life must breed.

communism proved unbiological, a handicap in the struggle for existence; that it gave insufficient stimulus to inventiveness, industry and thrift; and that the failure to reward the more able, and punish the less able, made for a leveling of capacity which was hostile to growth or to successful competition with other groups.

Nothing is lost in history: sooner or later every creative idea finds opportunity and development, and adds its color to the flame of life.

It was at that battle that Goethe, present on the staff of the Duke of Saxe-Weimar, made (we are told) a famous remark: "From today and from this place begins a new epoch in the history of the world.

THERE IS A PLEASURE in philosophy, and a lure even in the mirages of metaphysics, which every student feels until the coarse necessities of physical existence drag him from the heights of thought into the mart of economic strife and gain.

If the human brood is too numerous for the food supply, Nature has three agents for restoring the balance: famine, pestilence, and war.

heresy or blasphemy must be punished with death, even if the heretic should be one's closest kin.