Quotes by "Will Durant"

The trouble with most people is that they think with their hopes or fears or wishes rather than with their minds.

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

The individual succumbs, but he does not die if he has left something to mankind.

Never mind your happiness; do your duty.

Our knowledge is a receding mirage in an expanding desert of ignorance.

Tired mothers find that spanking takes less time than reasoning and penetrates sooner to the seat of the memory.

Science is organized knowledge. Wisdom is organized life.

And last are the few whose delight is in meditation and understanding; who yearn not for goods, nor for victory, but for knowledge; who leave both market and battlefield to lose themselves in the quiet clarity of secluded thought; whose will is a light rather than a fire, whose haven is not power but truth: these are the men of wisdom, who stand aside unused by the world.

اما هر کار می‌کنی، از فلسفه نمیر.

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

Traditions and dogmas rub one another down to a minimum in such centers of varied intercourse; where there are a thousand faiths we are apt to become sceptical of them all.

Great men speak to us only so far as we have ears and souls to hear them; only so far as we have in us the roots, at least, of that which flowers out in them.

Science gives us knowledge, but only philosophy can give us wisdom.

La educacion es el progresivo descubrimiento de nuestra propia ignorancia.

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.

Science is analytical description, philosophy is synthetic interpretation. Science wishes to resolve the whole into parts, the organism into organs, the obscure into the known. It does not inquire into the values and ideal possibilities of things, nor into their total and final significance; it is content to show their present actuality and operation, it narrows its gaze resolutely to the nature and process of things as they are. The scientist is as impartial as Nature in Turgenev's poem: he is as interested in the leg of a flea as in the creative throes of a genius. But the philosopher is not content to describe the fact; he wishes to ascertain its relation to experience in general, and thereby to get at its meaning and its worth; he combines things in interpretive synthesis; he tries to put together, better than before, that great universe-watch which the inquisitive scientist has analytically taken apart. Science tells us how to heal and how to kill; it reduces the death rate in retail and then kills us wholesale in war; but only wisdom desire coordinated in the light of all experience- can tell us when to heal and when to kill. To observe processes and to construct means is science; to criticize and coordinate ends is philosophy: and because in these days our means and instruments have multiplied beyond our interpretation and synthesis of ideals and ends, our life is full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. For a fact is nothing except in relation to desire; it is not complete except in relation to a purpose and a whole. Science without philosophy, facts without perspective and valuation, cannot save us from havoc and despair. Science gives us knowledge, but only philosophy can give us wisdom.

To observe processes and construct means is science; to criticize and coordinate ends is philosophy

Education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance.

What is modesty but hypocritical humility, by means of which, in a world swelling with envy, a man seeks to obtain pardon for excellences and merits from those who have none.