Literary Birthday – 10 May – Ariel Durant

Ariel Durant was born 10 May 1898, and died  25 October 1981.

Ariel Durant Quotes

1. A great civilisation is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within.
2. The influence of geographic factors diminishes as technology grows. The character and contour of a terrain may offer opportunities for agriculture, mining, or trade, but only the imagination and initiative of leaders, and the hardy industry of followers, can transform the possibilities into fact…Man, not the earth, makes civilisation.
3. If you have character, endeavour, personality, courage and the capacity for concentrated labour, you will do what is your destiny – and, perhaps, even do it well.
4. The present is the past rolled up for action, and the past is the present unrolled for understanding.
5. We must operate with partial knowledge, and be provisionally content with probabilities.

Ariel Durant was a Russian-born American researcher and writer. She was the co-author of The Story of Civilisation with her husband Will Durant.

Source for Image

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ariel_Durant_(1967).jpg

Bill Murphy, Los Angeles Times, CC BY 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

by Amanda Patterson

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