524 Quotes by Will Durant

To rise again - to be the same person that you were - you must have your memory perfectly fresh and present; for it is memory that makes your identity. If your memory be lost, how will you be the same man? Why do mankind flatter themselves that they alone are gifted with a spiritual and immortal principle? Perhaps from their inordinate vanity. I am persuaded that if a peacock could speak he would boast of his soul, and would affirm that it inhabited his magnificent tail.

Morality, like art, is the achievement of unity in diversity; the highest type of man is he who effectively unites in himself the widest variety, complexity, and completeness of life.

These steeples, everywhere pointing upward, ignoring despair and lifting hope--these lofty city spires or simple chapels in the hills--they rise at every step from the earth to the sky; in every village of every nation on the globe they challenge doubt and invite weary hearts to consolation. Is it all a vain delusion? Is there nothing beyond life but death, and nothing beyond death but decay? We cannot know, but as long as men suffer, those steeples will remain

A nation is born stoic, and dies epicurean

Passion without reason is blind, reason without passion is dead.Thought should not lack the heat of desire, nor desire the light of thought.

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

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

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

A true empiricism is one that sets itself the task of getting as close as possible to the original, of sounding the depths of life, of feeling the pulse of its spirit by a sort of intellectual auscultation"; we "listen in" on the current of life. By direct perception we feel the presence of the mind; by intellectual circumlocution we arrive at the notion that thought is a dance of molecules in the brain. Is there any doubt that intuition here beholds more truly the heart of life?