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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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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
Reason
Sympathy
Come
Warm
Feel
Sun
Urchin
Feels
Darkness
Groping
Even
Streets
Faiths
Trust
Precarious
Faith
Fragments
Learn
Simplest

More quotes by Will Durant

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History seldom destroys that which does not deserve to die and the burning of the tares makes for the next sowing a richer soil.
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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The South creates the civilizations, the North conquers them, ruins them, borrows from them, spreads them: this is one summary of history.
Will Durant
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Love one another. My final lesson of history is the same as that of Jesus. You may think that's a lot of lollipop but just try it. Love is the most practical thing in the world. If you take an attitude of love toward everybody you meet, you'll eventually get along.
Will Durant
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Progress is the increasing control of the environment by life.
Will Durant
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Can a civilization hold together if man abandons his faith in God?
Will Durant
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There is no significant example in history, before our time, of a society successfully maintaining moral life without the aid of religion.
Will Durant
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Knowledge is power but only wisdom is liberty.
Will Durant
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The great snare of thought is uncritical acceptance of irrational assumptions.
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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Nature has never read the Declaration of Independence. It continues to make us unequal.
Will Durant
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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
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There have been only 268 of the past 3,421 years free of war.
Will Durant
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If I were rich I would have many books, and I would pamper myself with bindings bright to the eye and soft to the touch, paper generously opaque, and type such as men designed when printing was very young. I would dress my gods in leather and gold, and burn candles of worship before them at night, and string their names like beads on a string.
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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Liberty is a product of order.
Will Durant
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Never mind your happiness do your duty.
Will Durant
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The time when you need to do something is when no one else is willing to do it, when people are saying it can't be done.
Will Durant
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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