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
Past
Flourishing
Absurdity
Hardly
Somewhere
Present
Found
Cannot

More quotes by Will Durant

Image
The only real revolution is in the enlightenment of the mind and the improvement of character, the only real emancipation is individual, and the only real revolutionists are philosophers and saints.
Will Durant
Image
Fundamentalism is the triumph of Paul over Christ.
Will Durant
Image
The future never just happened. It was created.
Will Durant
Image
To rulers religion, like almost everything else, is a tool of power.
Will Durant
Image
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
Image
Liberty is a product of order.
Will Durant
Image
To seek, beneath the universal strife, the hidden harmony of things.
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
Power dements even more than it corrupts, lowering the guard of foresight and raising the haste of action.
Will Durant
Image
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
Image
Nature has never read the Declaration of Independence. It continues to make us unequal.
Will Durant
Image
Philosophy begins when one learns to doubt -- particularly to doubt one's cherished beliefs, one's dogmas and one's axioms.
Will Durant
Image
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
Image
Those who know nothing about history are doomed forever to repeat it.
Will Durant
Image
The world wisely prefers happiness to wisdom.
Will Durant
Image
It is one of the most culpable oversights of nature that virtue and beauty so often come in separate packages.
Will Durant
Image
As soon as liberty is complete it dies in anarchy.
Will Durant
Image
We teach more by what we are than by what we teach.
Will Durant
Image
Who will dare to write a history of human goodness?
Will Durant
Image
Friends are helpful not only because they will listen to us, but because they will laugh at us Through them we learn a little objectivity, a little modesty, a little courtesy We learn the rules of life and become better players of the game
Will Durant