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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
Desert
Ignorance
Knowledge
Receding
Mirage
Mirages
Expanding

More quotes by 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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Who will dare to write a history of human goodness?
Will Durant
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India will teach us the tolerance and gentleness of mature mind, understanding spirit and a unifying, pacifying love for all human beings.
Will Durant
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Communism is the opiate of the people.
Will Durant
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It is true that even across the Himalayan barrier India has sent to the west, such gifts as grammar and logic, philosophy and fables, hypnotism and chess, and above all numerals and the decimal system.
Will Durant
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Nature has never read the Declaration of Independence. It continues to make us unequal.
Will Durant
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Time sanctifies everything even the most arrant theft in the hands of the robber's grandchildren becomes sacred and inviolable property.
Will Durant
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Those who know nothing about history are doomed forever to repeat it.
Will Durant
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Every science begins as philosophy and ends as art it arises in hypothesis and flows into achievement.
Will Durant
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We teach more by what we are than by what we teach.
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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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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Truth always originates in a minority of one, and every custom begins as a broken precedent.
Will Durant
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We Americans are the best informed people on earth as to the events of the last twenty-four hours we are the not the best informed as the events of the last sixty centuries.
Will Durant
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So prominent was the Jewish role in the foreign commerce of Europe that those nations that received the Jews gained and the countries that excluded them lost in the volume of international trade.
Will Durant
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Hunting is now to most of us a game, whose relish seems based upon some mystic remembrance, in the blood, of ancient days when to hunter as well as hunted it was a matter of life and death.
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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It may be true that you can't fool all the people all the time, but you can fool enough of them to rule a large country.
Will Durant
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As to harmonizing the theory of evolution with the Biblical account of creation, I do not believe it can be done, and I do not see why it should be. The story of Genesis is beautiful, and profoundly significant as symbolism: there is no good reason to torture it into conformity with modern theory.
Will Durant
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History is so indifferently rich, that a case for almost any conclusion from it can be made by a selection of instances.
Will Durant