Will Durant

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

When liberty destroys order the hunger for order will destroy liberty.

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

One of the lessons of history is that nothing is often a good thing to do and always a clever thing to say.

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

Never mind your happiness do your duty.

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

So I should say that civilizations begin with religion and stoicism: they end with scepticism and unbelief and the undisciplined pursuit of individual pleasure. A civilization is born stoic and dies epicurean.

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

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

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

Death like style is the removal of rubbish.

Grow strong, my comrade _ that you may standUnshaken when I fall; that I may knowThe shattered fragments of my song will comeAt last to finer melody in you;That I may tell my heart that you beginWhere passing I leave off, and fathom more.

[N]o language has ever had a word for a virgin man.

Science is organized knowledge. Wisdom is organized life.

Civilizations are the generations of the racial soul. As family-rearing, and then writing, bound the generations together, handing down the lore of the dying to the young, so print and commerce and a thousand ways of communication may bind the civilizations together, and preserve for future cultures all that is of value for them in our own. Let us, before we die, gather up our heritage, and offer it to our children.

There is hardly an absurdity of the past that cannot be found flourishing somewhere in the present. Underneath all civilization, ancient or modern, moved and still moves a sea of magic, superstition and sorcery. Perhaps they will remain when the works of our reason have passed away.

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.