Will Durant Quotes and Sayings - Page 1

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

#Inspirational #Life #Positive

“To say nothing, especially when speaking, is half the art of diplomacy.”
-- Will Durant

#Art #Communication #Half

“Education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance.”
-- Will Durant

#Graduation #Education #Witty

“The trouble with most people is that they think with their hopes or fears or wishes rather than with their minds.”
-- Will Durant

#Honesty #Fear #Integrity

“The political machine triumphs because it is a united minority acting against a divided majority.”
-- Will Durant

#Political #Acting #Minorities

“India was the motherland of our race, and Sanskrit the mother of Europe's languages: she was the mother of our philosophy; mother, through the Arabs, of much of our mathematics; mother, through the Buddha, of the ideals embodied in Christianity; mother, through the village community, of self-government and democracy. Mother India is in many ways the mother of us all.”
-- Will Durant

#Mother #Philosophy #Race

“The health of nations is more important than the wealth of nations.”
-- Will Durant

#Health #Important #Wealth

“If we have never been amazed by the very fact that we exist, we are squandering the greatest fact of all.”
-- Will Durant

#Facts #Squandering #Amazed

“Knowledge is the eye of desire and can become the pilot of the soul.”
-- Will Durant

#Education #Knowledge #Eye

“To speak ill of others is a dishonest way of praising ourselves. Nothing is often a good thing to say, and always a clever thing to say.”
-- Will Durant

#Clever #Way #Speak

“Science gives us knowledge, but only philosophy can give us wisdom.”
-- Will Durant

#Philosophy #Giving

“If our economy of freedom fails to distribute wealth as ably as it has created it, the road to dictatorship will be open to any man who can persuasively promise security to all.”
-- Will Durant

#Men #Promise #Revolution

“Every science begins as philosophy and ends as art; it arises in hypothesis and flows into achievement.”
-- Will Durant

#Art #Philosophy #Achievement

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

#War #Struggle #Rome

“How much more suffering is caused by the thought of death than by death itself.”
-- Will Durant

#Suffering

“It came to me that reform should begin at home, and since that day I have not had time to remake the world.”
-- Will Durant

#Change #Home #World

“Friends are helpful not only because they will listen to us, but because they will laugh at us; Through them we learn a little objectivity, a little modesty, a little courtesy; We learn the rules of life and become better players of the game”
-- Will Durant

#Learning #Player #Objectivity

“In philosophy, as in politics, the longest distance between two points is a straight line.”
-- Will Durant

#Distance #Philosophy #Two

“Even when repressed, inequality grows; only the man who is below the average in economic ability desires equality; those who are conscious of superior ability desire freedom, and in the end superior ability has its way.”
-- Will Durant

#Men #Average #Desire

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

#Running #Men #Circles

“All that is good in our history is gathered in libraries. At this moment, Plato is down there at the library waiting for us. So is Aristotle. Spinoza is there and so is Kats. Shelly and Byron adn Sam Johnson are there waiting to tell us their magnificent stories. All you have to do is walk in the library door and the great company open their arms to you. They are so happy to see you that they come out with you into the street and to your home. And they do what hardly any friend will-- they are silent when you wish to think.”
-- Will Durant

#Plato #Home #Thinking

“Education is the transmission of civilization.”
-- Will Durant

#Education #Civilization #Transmission

“Moral codes adjust themselves to environmental conditions.”
-- Will Durant

#Environmental #Moral #Morality

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

#Men #Ego #Mind

“Never mind your happiness; do your duty.”
-- Will Durant

#Mind #Duty

“Inquiry is fatal to certainty.”
-- Will Durant

#Learning #Acceptance #Science

“The Islamic conquest of India is probably the bloodiest story in history. It is a discouraging tale, for its evident moral is that civilization is a precious good, whose delicate complex of order and freedom, culture and peace, can at any moment be overthrown by barbarians invading from without or multiplying within.”
-- Will Durant

#Islamic #Order #Civilization

“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

#Stress #Discovery #Order

“When liberty becomes license, dictatorship is near.”
-- Will Durant

#Liberty #Dictatorship

“If man asks for many laws it is only because he is sure that his neighbor needs them; privately he is an unphilosophical anarchist, and thinks laws in his own case superfluous.”
-- Will Durant

#Men #Thinking #Law