Quote

There is hardly an absurdity of the past that cannot be found flourishing somewhere in the present.

Will Durant

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Absurdity
Hardly
Somewhere
Present
Found
Cannot
Past
Flourishing

More quotes by Will Durant

Image
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
Image
I came to think of myself, not as a dance and chaos of molecules, but as a brief and minute portion of that majestic process
Will Durant
Image
Education is the transformation of civilisation
Will Durant
Image
Bankers know that history is inflationary and that money is the last thing a wise man will hoard
Will Durant
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Christianity did not destroy paganism it adopted it.
Will Durant
Image
Wherever men do things, other men will arise who will explain to them how things should be done.
Will Durant
Image
We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.
Will Durant
Image
Truth will not make us rich, but it will make us free.
Will Durant
Image
We conclude that the concentration of wealth is natural and inevitable, and is periodically alleviated by violent or peaceable partial redistribution. In this view all economic history is the slow heartbeat of the social organism, a vast systole and diastole of concentrating wealth and compulsive redistribution.
Will Durant
Image
Fundamentalism is the triumph of Paul over Christ.
Will Durant
Image
I have tried to be impartial, though I know that a man's past always colors his views, and that nothing else is so irritating as impartiality.
Will Durant
Image
The greatest question of our time is not communism vs. individualism, not Europe vs. America, not even the East vs. the West it is whether men can bear to live without God.
Will Durant
Image
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
Image
To speak ill of others is a dishonest way of praising ourselves let us be above such transparent egotism. If you can't say good and encouraging things, say nothing. Nothing is often a good thing to do, and always a clever thing to say.
Will Durant
Image
Progress is the increasing control of the environment by life.
Will Durant
Image
The South creates the civilizations, the North conquers them, ruins them, borrows from them, spreads them: this is one summary of history.
Will Durant
Image
History reports that the men who can manage men manage the men who can manage only things, and the men who can manage money manage all.
Will Durant
Image
From barbarism to civilization requires a century from civilization to barbarism needs but a day.
Will Durant