Will Durant Quotes

Most of us spend too much time on the last twenty-four hours and too little on the last six thousand years.

Forget mistakes. Forget failure. Forget everything except what you're going to do now and do it. Today is your lucky day.

Nothing is often a good thing to do and always a good thing to say.

A history of civilization shares the presumptuousness of every philosophical enterprise: it offers the ridiculous spectacle of a fragment expounding the whole. Like philosophy, such a venture has no rational excuse, and is at best but a brave stupidity; but let us hope that, like philosophy, it will always lure some rash spirits into its fatal depths.

All science is a charted ignorance and belongs to Maya.

but now and then liberty, in the slogans of the strong, means freedom from restraint in the exploitation of the weak.

Nobody loves a policeman until he needs one.

Magic begins in superstition, and ends in science. ... At every step the history of civilization teaches us how slight and superficial a structure civilization is, and how precariously it is poised upon the apex of a never-extinct volcano of poor and oppressed barbarism, superstition and ignorance. Modernity is a cap superimposed upon the Middle Ages, which always remain.