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To give life a meaning, one must have a purpose larger than self.

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
Self
Must
Giving
Life
Larger
Meaning
Purpose
Give

More quotes by Will Durant

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If we have never been amazed by the very fact that we exist, we are squandering the greatest fact of all.
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Knowledge is the eye of desire and can become the pilot of the soul.
Will Durant
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Never put a man in the wrong. He will hold it against you forever.
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The crossroads of trade are the meeting place of ideas, the attrition ground of rival customs and beliefs diversities beget conflict, comparison, thought superstitions cancel one another, and reason begins.
Will Durant
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Liberty is a product of order.
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We have conferred a mystic popularity upon officials whose only virtue is their timidity while our scorn of rebels and reformers is so great that we have ceased to persecute them. The capitals and governments of the world are in the hands of caution and change comes over them only in the night, unseen.
Will Durant
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Can a civilization hold together if man abandons his faith in God?
Will Durant
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To rulers religion, like almost everything else, is a tool of power.
Will Durant
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Peace is an unstable equilibrium, which can be preserved only by acknowledged supremacy or equal power.
Will Durant
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As knowledge grew, fear decreased men thought less of worshiping the unknown, and more of overcoming it.
Will Durant
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Those who know nothing about history are doomed forever to repeat it.
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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So I should say that civilizations begin with religion and stoicism: they end with scepticism and unbelief, and the undisciplined pursuit of individual pleasure. A civilization is born stoic and dies epicurean.
Will Durant
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Philosophy begins when one learns to doubt -- particularly to doubt one's cherished beliefs, one's dogmas and one's axioms.
Will Durant
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History repeats itself in the large because human nature changes with geological leisureliness.
Will Durant
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In progressive societies the concentration[of wealth] may reach a point where the strength of number in the many poor rivals the strength of ability in the few rich then the unstable equilibrium generates a critical situation, which history has diversely met by legislation redistributing wealth or by revolution distributing poverty.
Will Durant
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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
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Grow strong, my comrade … that you may stand Unshaken when I fall that I may know The shattered fragments of my song will come At last to finer melody in you That I may tell my heart that you begin Where passing I leave off, and fathom more.
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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In philosophy, as in politics, the longest distance between two points is a straight line.
Will Durant