Will Durant Archives ~ The Imaginative Conservative

The Man Who Discovered Troy?

By Will Durant|2019-04-04T10:38:29-05:00January 2nd, 2017|Categories: Civilization, Family, Featured, History, Homer, Iliad, Will Durant|

In 1870, Heinrich Schliemann went to the Troad, the northwest corner of Asia Minor, and made up his mind, against all current scholarly opinion, that Priam’s Troy lay buried under the hill called Hissarlik… In the year 1822, a lad was born in Germany who was to turn the spade work of archeology into one [...]

Do Not Try to Reform the World

By Will Durant|2020-11-04T14:54:45-06:00November 7th, 2016|Categories: Civilization, Family, Featured, Quotation, Will Durant|

It is foolish to take sides in disputes, or seek some other place or mode of living, or to envy the future or the past; all desire is delusion. Even life is an uncertain good; death not a certain evil; one should have no prejudices against either of them. Best of all is a calm [...]

An Ode to Great Books and a Beautiful Library

By W. Winston Elliott III|2021-03-04T16:45:59-06:00May 29th, 2016|Categories: Books, Essential, Featured, Libraries, Timeless Essays, W. Winston Elliott III, Will Durant, Wisdom|

“If I were rich I would have many books, and I would pamper myself with bindings bright to the eye and soft to the touch, in paper generously opaque, and type such as men designed when printing was very young. I would dress my gods in leather and gold, and burn candles of worship before [...]

The Imaginative Stimulus Indispensable to Life

By Will Durant|2020-01-08T13:18:01-06:00April 6th, 2016|Categories: Family, Featured, Imagination, Quotation, Will Durant|

“Saddest of all is a poem engraved upon a slab now in the Leyden Museum, and dating back to 2200 B.C. Carpe diem, it sings—snatch the day! […]

The Essential Diagnosis of Our Time

By Will Durant|2020-01-08T13:19:20-06:00February 3rd, 2016|Categories: Civilization, Family, Featured, Quotation, Religion, Will Durant|

This is the essential diagnosis of our time. It is not merely great wars that have plunged us into pessimism, much less the economic depression of these recent years; we have to do here with something far deeper than a temporary diminution of our wealth, or even the death of millions of men; it is [...]

Chaos: The Gestating Principle of Civilization

By Will Durant|2020-01-08T13:20:12-06:00November 25th, 2015|Categories: Civilization, Family, Featured, Quotation, Will Durant|

A certain tension between religion and society marks the higher stages of every civilization. Religion begins by offering magical aid to harassed and bewildered men; it culminates by giving to a people that unity of morals and belief which seem so favorable to statesmanship and art; it ends by fighting suicidally in the lost cause of the past. [...]

Ruled by Imagination

By Will Durant|2020-01-08T13:21:00-06:00October 21st, 2015|Categories: Family, Featured, Imagination, Morality, Quotation, Will Durant|

Morals are soon endowed with religious sanctions because mystery and supernaturalism lend a weight that can never attach to things empirically known and genetically understood; men are more easily ruled by imagination than by science. — Will and Ariel Durant, The Story of Civilization, Volume 1.56 […]

Why Do We Love Plato?

By Will Durant|2019-10-30T12:32:53-05:00July 15th, 2015|Categories: Books, Family, Featured, Plato, Quotation, Will Durant|

Why do we love Plato? Because Plato himself was a lover: lover of comrades, lover of the intoxication of dialectical revelry, passionate seeker of the elusive reality behind thoughts and things. We love him for his unstinted energy, for the wild nomadic play of his fancy, for the joy which he found in life in [...]

History: The Miracles of Memory and Tradition

By Will Durant|2019-10-30T14:16:07-05:00September 3rd, 2013|Categories: Family, Featured, History, Quotation, Will Durant, Wisdom|

The very excess of our present paganism may warrant some hope that it will not long endure; for usually excess generates its opposite. One of the most regular sequences in history is that a period of pagan license is followed by an age of puritan restraint and moral discipline. So the moral decay of ancient [...]

The Fall of Rome

By Will Durant|2019-04-04T10:39:18-05:00November 7th, 2012|Categories: Family, Featured, Rome, Will Durant, Wisdom|

Will Durant A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself within. The essential cause of Rome’s decline lay in her people, her morals, her class struggle, her failing trade, her bureaucratic despotism, her stifling taxes, her consuming wars.—Caesar and Christ […]

On Natural Disasters

By Will Durant|2019-10-30T14:16:19-05:00October 30th, 2012|Categories: Family, Featured, Nature, W. Winston Elliott III, Will Durant|

“At any moment a comet may come too close to the earth and set our little globe turning topsy-turvy in a hectic course, or choke its men and fleas with fumes or heat; or a fragment of the smiling sun may slip off tangentially–as some think our planet did a few astronomic moments ago–and fall [...]

The Map of Human Character

By Will Durant|2020-11-04T15:33:33-06:00May 17th, 2012|Categories: Character, Family, Featured, History, Will Durant, Wisdom|

Because of every element of environment that has affected you, every man or woman that has met you, every book that you have read, every experience that you have had; all these are accumulated in your memory, your body, your character, your soul. “History” said Henry Ford, “is bunk.” As one who has written history [...]

Civilization

By Will Durant|2019-04-04T10:39:30-05:00May 16th, 2012|Categories: Civilization, Family, Featured, Quotation, Will Durant, Wisdom|

Will Durant “Civilization is social order promoting cultural creation. Four elements constitute it: economic provision, political organization, moral tradition, and the pursuit of knowledge and the arts. It begins where chaos and insecurity end. For when fear is overcome, curiosity and constructiveness are free, and man passes by natural impulse towards the understanding [...]

This I Believe

By Will Durant|2019-04-04T10:39:32-05:00February 27th, 2012|Categories: Family, Featured, Quotation, Will Durant, Wisdom|

Will Durant I find in the Universe so many forms of order, organization, system, law and adjustment of means to ends, that I believe in a cosmic intelligence and I conceive God as the life, mind, order and law of the world. I do not understand my God, and I find in nature [...]