Will Durant: Trending quotes

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Will Durant: 170 quotes30 likes

“Life is that which can hold a purpose for three thousand years and never yield. The individual fails, but life succeeds. The individual is foolish, but life holds in its blood and seed the wisdom of generations. The individual dies, but life, tireless and undiscourageble, goes on, wondering, longing, planning, trying, mounting, longing.”

Source: Fallen Leaves (2014), Ch. 5 : On Death

“Here and everywhere is the struggle for existence, life inextricably enmeshed with war. All life living at the expense of life, every organism eating other organisms forever.”

Source: Fallen Leaves (2014), Ch. 4 : On Old Age

“A man is as old as his arteries, and as young as his ideas.”

Source: Fallen Leaves (2014), Ch. 4 : On Old Age

“As we find a place in the economic world the rebellion of youth subsides; we disapprove of earthquakes when our feet are on the earth. We forget then the radicalism then in a gentle liberalism — which is radicalism softened with the consciousness of a bank account.”

Source: Fallen Leaves (2014), Ch. 3 : On Middle Age

“Middle age begins with marriage; for then work and responsibility replace carefree play, passion surrenders to the limitations of social order, and poetry yields to prose.”

Source: Fallen Leaves (2014), Ch. 3 : On Middle Age

“It is life that educates, and perhaps love more than anything else in life.”

Source: Fallen Leaves (2014), Ch. 2 : On Youth

“Let us ask the Gods not for possessions, but for things to do; happiness is in making things rather than consuming them.”

Source: Fallen Leaves (2014), Ch. 2 : On Youth

“Happiness is the free play of the instincts, and so is youth.”

Source: Fallen Leaves (2014), Ch. 2 : On Youth

“Childhood may be defined as the age of play; therefore some children are never young, and some adults are never old.”

Source: Fallen Leaves (2014), Ch. 1 : Our life begins

“Life is that which is discontent, which struggles and seeks, which suffers and creates.”

Source: Fallen Leaves (2014), Ch. 1 : Our life begins

“Wisdom, if it were young, would cherish love, nursing it with devotion, deepening it with sacrifice, vitalizing with parentage, making all things subordinate to it till the end. Even though it consumes us in its service and overwhelms us with tragedy, even though it breaks us down with separations, let it be first. How can it matter what price we pay for love?”

Source: Fallen Leaves (2014), Ch. 2 : On Youth

“The principle of the family was mutual aid; but the principle of society is competition, the struggle for existence, the elimination of the weak and the survival of the strong.”

Source: Fallen Leaves (2014), Ch. 2 : On Youth

“Youth is learning to read (which is all that one learns in school), and is learning where and how to find what he may later need to know (which is the best of the arts that he acquires in college). Nothing learned from a book is worth anything until it is used and verified in life; only then does it begin to affect behavior and desire. It is Life that educates, and perhaps love more than anything else in life.”

Fallen Leaves (2014)

“Man is as young as the risks he takes.”

Source: Fallen Leaves (2014), Ch. 2 : On Youth

“See him, the newborn, dirty but marvelous, ridiculous in actuality, infinite in possibility, capable of that ultimate miracle, growth.”

Source: Fallen Leaves (2014), Ch. 1 : Our life begins

“Children and fools speak the truth; and somehow they find happiness in their sincerity.”

Source: Fallen Leaves (2014), Ch. 1 : Our life begins

“To all Christian governments Christianity was not a rule of means but a means of rule; Christ was for the people, Machiavelli was preferred by the kings. The state in some measure had civilized man, but who would civilize the state?”

Will Durant book The Story of Civilization

Source: The Story of Civilization (1935–1975), VI - The Reformation (1957), Chapter 6, p. 229

“I know how unfashionable it is now to acknowledge in life or history any genius loftier than ourselves. Our democratic dogma has leveled not only all voters but all leaders; we delight to show that living geniuses are only mediocrities, and that dead ones are myths. … Since it is contrary to good manners to exalt ourselves, we achieve the same result by slyly indicating how inferior are the great men of the earth. In some of us, perhaps, it is a noble and merciless asceticism, which would root out of our hearts the last vestige of worship and adoration, lest the old gods should return and terrify us again. For my part, I cling to this final religion, and discover in it a content and stimulus more lasting than came from the devotional ecstasies of youth.”

The Greatest Minds and Ideas of All Time (2002) edited by John Little, Ch. 1 : The Shameless Worship of Heroes

“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.”

We Have a Right To Be Happy Today https://web.archive.org/web/20130106111821/http://www.willdurant.com/youth.htm, commencement address at the Webb School of Claremont, California (7 June 1958)

“Excellence is an art won by training and habituation: we do not act rightly because we have virtue or excellence, but we rather have these because we have acted rightly; 'these virtues are formed in man by his doing the actions'; we are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit: 'the good of man is a working of the soul in the way of excellence in a complete life... for as it is not one swallow or one fine day that makes a spring, so it is not one day or a short time that makes a man blessed and happy.'”

Will Durant book The Story of Philosophy

Source: The Story of Philosophy (1926), p. 87. The quoted phrases within the quotation are from the Nicomachean Ethics, Book II, 4; Book I, 7