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Our knowledge is a receding mirage in an expanding desert of ignorance.

Will Durant

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Will Durant
Age: 96 †
Born: 1885
Born: November 5
Died: 1981
Died: November 7
Historian
Philosopher
Writer
North Adams
Massachusetts
William James Will Durant
William James Durant
Receding
Mirage
Mirages
Expanding
Desert
Ignorance
Knowledge

More quotes by Will Durant

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Civilizations come and go they conquer the earth and crumble into dust but faith survives every desolation.
Will Durant
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We teach more by what we are than by what we teach.
Will Durant
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How much more suffering is caused by the thought of death than by death itself.
Will Durant
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Science tells us how to heal and how to kill it reduces our death rate in retail and then kills us wholesale in war but only wisdom - desire coordinated in the light of all experience - can tell us when to heal and when to kill.
Will Durant
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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
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It is one of the most culpable oversights of nature that virtue and beauty so often come in separate packages.
Will Durant
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Fundamentalism is the triumph of Paul over Christ.
Will Durant
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The laws that Charondas gave to Catana,... A man might divorce his wife, or a wife her husband, said Charondas, but then he or she must not marry anyone younger than the divorced mate.
Will Durant
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Philosophy is harmonized knowledge making a harmonious life it is the self-discipline which lifts us to serenity and freedom. Knowledge is power, but only wisdom is liberty.
Will Durant
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History is mostly guessing the rest is prejudice.
Will Durant
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Cultivate your garden. Do not depend upon teachers to educate you... follow your own bent, pursue your curiosity bravely, express yourself, make your own harmony.
Will Durant
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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
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Civilization begins with order, grows with liberty, and dies with chaos.
Will Durant
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Often your face is your autobiography
Will Durant
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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
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Civilizaton is the interval between Ice Ages.
Will Durant
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There is hardly an absurdity of the past that cannot be found flourishing somewhere in the present.
Will Durant
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In the end, nothing is lost. Every event, for good or evil, has effects forever.
Will Durant
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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
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Never mind your happiness do your duty.
Will Durant