524 Quotes by Will Durant

Science is organized knowledge. Wisdom is organized life.

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.

How little you know the age you live in," says a god in Ovid, "if you fancy that honey is sweeter than cash in hand.

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.

When those who must do the fighting have the right to decide between war and peace, history will no longer be written in blood.

Life is not made for happiness, but for achievement. "The history of the world is not the theatre of happiness; periods of happiness are blank pages in it, for they are periods of harmony"; and this dull content is unworthy of man.History is made only in those periods in which the contradictions of reality are being resolved by growth, as the hesitations of and awkwardness of youth pass into the ease and order of maturity.

A sense of humor, being born of perspective, bears a near kinship to philosophy; each is the soul of the other.

A book is a friend that will do what no friend does - be silent when we wish to think.

Spinoza is not to be read, he is to be studied; you must approach him as you would approach Euclid, recognizing that in these brief two hundred pages a man has written down his lifetime's thought with stoic sculptury of everything superfluous.