Will Durant Quotes

Science is organized knowledge. Wisdom is organized life.

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Every science begins as philosophy and ends as art; it arises in hypothesis and flows into achievement.

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Education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance.

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Civilization exists by geological consent, subject to change without notice.

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So the story of man runs in a dreary circle, because he is not yet master of the earth that holds him.

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To rulers religion, like almost everything else, is a tool of power.

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Nature smiles at the union of freedom and equality in our utopias. For freedom and equality are sworn and everlasting enemies, and when one prevails the other dies.

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Even when repressed, inequality grows; only the man who is below the average in economic ability desires equality; those who are conscious of superior ability desire freedom, and in the end superior ability has its way.

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...but which of us has read every line of the Iliad, or the Aeneid, or The Divine Comedy, or Paradise Lost? Only men of epic stomach can digest these epic tales.

1954

The love we have in our youth is superficial compared to the love that an old man has for his old wife.

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The institutions, conventions, customs and laws that make up the complex structure of a society are the work of a hundred centuries and a billion minds; and one mind must not expect to comprehend them in one lifetime, much less in twenty years.

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