Will Durant Quotes
November 5, 1885 – November 7, 1981
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The family is the nucleus of civilization.
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More Will Durant Quotes
I have tried to be impartial, though I know that a man's past always colors his views, and that nothing else is so irritating as impartiality.
Will Durant— Preface (VI - The Reformation (1957))
Sixty years ago I knew everything . Now I know nothing . Education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance .
Will Durant— Quoted in "Books: The Great Gadfly", Time magazine, 8 October 1965 (review of The Age of Voltaire by Will and Ariel Durant)
The only real revolution is in the enlightenment of the mind and the improvement of character , the only real emancipation is individual , and the only real revolutionaries are philosophers and saints .
Will Durant— The Lessons of History (1968)?, p. 72 (co-authored with Ariel Durant)
To speak ill of others is a dishonest way of praising ourselves; let us be above such transparent egotism. If you can't say good and encouraging things, say nothing. Nothing is often a good thing to do, and always a clever thing to say.
Will Durant— Commencement Speech. We Have a Right To Be Happy Today. Webb School of Claremont, CA. 7 Jun 1958.
Civilization exists by geological consent, subject to change without notice.
Will Durant— "What is Civilization?" Ladies' Home Journal, LXIII (January, 1946).
Human progress having reached a high level through respect for the liberty and dignity of men, it has become desirable to re-affirm these evident truths:
Will Durant— That differences of race, color, and creed are natural, and that diverse groups, institutions, and ideas are stimulating factors in the development of man;That to promote harmony in diversity is a responsible task of religion and statesmanship;That since no individual can express the whole truth, it is essential to treat with understanding and good will those whose views differ from our own;That by the testimony of history intolerance is the door to violence, brutality and dictatorship; andThat the realization of human interdependence and solidarity is the best guard of civilization.
I feel for all faiths the warm sympathy of one who has come to learn that even the trust in reason is a precarious faith, and that we are all fragments of darkness groping for the sun. I know no more about the ultimates than the simplest urchin in the streets.
Will Durant— Preface (VI - The Reformation (1957))
Power dements even more than it corrupts, lowering the guard of foresight and raising the haste of action.
Will Durant— As quoted in Midnight by Dean Koontz
The only real revolution is in the enlightenment of the mind and the improvement of character, the only real emancipation is individual, and the only real revolutionaries are philosophers and saints.
Will Durant— Will Durant, The Lessons of History (1968)?, p. 72 (co-authored with Ariel Durant)
A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself within. The essential causes of Rome's decline lay in her people, her morals, her class struggle, her failing trade, her bureaucratic despotism, her stifling taxes, her consuming wars.
Will Durant— Will Durant, Caesar and Christ (1944), Epilogue, p. 665.
A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself within. The essential causes of Rome’s decline lay in her people, her morals, her class struggle, her failing trade, her bureaucratic despotism, her stifling taxes, her consuming wars.
Will Durant— Will Durant, Caesar and Christ, Epilogue, p. 665 (1944)
We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.
Will Durant— Variant: We are what we repeatedly do, therefore excellence is not an act, but a habit.
— Source: Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy: The Lives and Opinions of the World's Greatest Philosophers (1926) [Simon & Schuster/Pocket Books, 1991, ISBN 0-671-73916-6] Ch. II: Aristotle and Greek Science; part VII: Ethics and the Nature of Happiness: "Excellence is an art won by training and habituation: we do not act rightly because we have virtue or excellence, but we rather have these because we have acted rightly; 'these virtues are formed in man by his doing the actions'; we are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit: 'the good of man is a working of the soul in the way of excellence in a complete life... for as it is not one swallow or one fine day that makes a spring, so it is not one day or a short time that makes a man blessed and happy'" (p. 76). The quoted phrases within the quotation are from the Nicomachean Ethics, Book II, 4; Book I, 7. The misattribution is from taking Durant's summation of Aristotle's ideas as being the words of Aristotle himself.
