Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
Civilizations, I believe, come to birth and proceed to grow by successfully responding to successive challenges. They break down and go to pieces if and when a challenge confronts them that they fail to meet.
Arnold J. Toynbee
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
TAGS & TOPICS
Arnold J. Toynbee
Age: 85 †
Born: 1889
Born: April 14
Died: 1975
Died: January 1
Diplomat
Historian
University Teacher
London
England
Toynbee
Arnold Joseph Toynbee
Arnold Toynbee
Pieces
Successfully
Grow
Responding
Challenges
Fail
Grows
Challenge
Break
Meet
Confronts
Belief
Civilization
Successive
Come
Birth
Civilizations
Believe
Failing
Proceed
More quotes by Arnold J. Toynbee
I do not believe that civilizations have to die because civilization is not an organism. It is a product of wills.
Arnold J. Toynbee
I believe that a religious conversion is the only way to stimulate the peoples of the industrialized nations to be willing to make sacrifices for the sake of esho funi (the oneness of self and environment). ... I wish the entire world would accept as an item of religious faith the concept of esho funi and its moral obligations.
Arnold J. Toynbee
The penalty of affluence is that it cuts one off from the common lot, common experience, and common fellowship. In a sense it outlaws one automatically from one's birthright of membership in the great human family.
Arnold J. Toynbee
Religion holds the solution to all problems of human relationship, whether they are between parents and children or nation and nation. Sooner or later, man has always had to decide whether he worships his own power or the power of God.
Arnold J. Toynbee
Sooner or later, man has always had to decide whether he worships his own power or the power of God.
Arnold J. Toynbee
Civilization is a movement and not a condition, a voyage and not a harbor.
Arnold J. Toynbee
Civilizations die from suicide, not by murder.
Arnold J. Toynbee
The twentieth century will be chiefly remembered by future generations not as an era of political conflicts or technical inventions, but as an age in which human society dared to think of the welfare of the whole human race as a practical objective.
Arnold J. Toynbee
Apathy can be overcome by enthusiasm.
Arnold J. Toynbee
No being can be what he is unless he is putting his essence into action in his field.
Arnold J. Toynbee
The absolute value of love makes life worth while, and so makes Man's strange and difficult situation acceptable. Love cannot save life from death but it can fulfill life's purpose.
Arnold J. Toynbee
Man's true end is to glorify God and to enjoy Him for ever.
Arnold J. Toynbee
We human beings do have some genuine freedom of choice and therefore some effective control over our own destinies. I am not a determinist. But I also believe that the decisive choice is seldom the latest choice in the series. More often than not, it will turn out to be some choice made relatively far back in the past.
Arnold J. Toynbee
The last stage but one of every civilisation, is characterised by the forced political unification of its constituent parts, into a single greater whole.
Arnold J. Toynbee
There is no such thing as gratitude in international politics.
Arnold J. Toynbee
History is a vision of God's creation on the move.
Arnold J. Toynbee
Angkor is perhaps the greatest of Man's essays in rectangular architecture that has yet been brought to life.
Arnold J. Toynbee
The immense cities lie basking on the beaches of the continent like whales that have taken to the land.
Arnold J. Toynbee
Adversity in the things of this world opens the door for spiritual salvation.
Arnold J. Toynbee
Our western science is a child of moral virtues and it must now become the father of further moral virtues if its extraordinary material triumphs in our time are not to bring human history to an abrupt, unpleasant and discreditable end.
Arnold J. Toynbee
