A Quote by Will Durant

To speak ill of others is a dishonest way of praising ourselves. Nothing is often a good thing to say, and always a clever thing to say.

Will Durant

Quote Topics

Always Clever Dishonest Good Good Thing Ill Nothing Often Others Ourselves Praising Say Speak Thing Way

Quote Author

Will Durant
American - Historian
November 5, 1885 - November 7, 1981

To speak ill of others is a dishonest way of praising ourselves; let us be above such transparent egotism. If you can't say good and encouraging things, say nothing. Nothing is often a good thing to do, and always a clever thing to say.

Will Durant

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

Will Durant

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

Will Durant

Speak the truth. Speak it loud and often, calmly but insistently, and speak it, as the Quakers say, to power. Material accumulation is not the purpose of human existence. All growth is not good. The environment is a necessity, not a luxury. There is such a thing as enough.

Donella Meadows

People often say that 'beauty is in the eye of the beholder,' and I say that the most liberating thing about beauty is realizing that you are the beholder. This empowers us to find beauty in places where others have not dared to look, including inside ourselves.

Salma Hayek

What I say is what I say, I don't always say the right thing, I don't always say the politically correct thing. I don't have any regrets about that.

Bruce Willis

Satirical writers and speakers are not half so clever as they think themselves, nor as they are thought to be. They do winnow the corn, it is true, but it is to feed upon the chaff. I am sorry to add that they who are always speaking ill of others are also very apt to be doing ill to them. It requires some talent and some generosity to find out talent and generosity in others, though nothing but self-conceit and malice are needed to discover or to imagine faults. It is much easier for an ill-natured man than for a good-natured man to be smart and witty.

James Sharp

You said, 'I love you.' Why is it that the most unoriginal thing we can say to one another is still the thing we long to hear? 'I love you' is always a quotation. You did not say it first and neither did I, yet when you say it and when I say it we speak like savages who have found three words and worship them. I did worship them but now I am alone on a rock hewn out of my own body.

Jeanette Winterson

We often have need of a profound philosophy to restore to our feelings their original state of innocence, to find our way out of the rubble of things alien to us, to begin to feel for ourselves and to speak ourselves, and I might almost say to exist ourselves.

Georg C. Lichtenberg

Nowadays, to say that we are clever animals is not to say something philosophical and pessimistic but something political and hopeful - namely, if we can work together, we can make ourselves into whatever we are clever and courageous enough to imagine ourselves becoming. This is to set aside Kant's question "What is man?" and to substitute the question "What sort of world can we prepare for our great grandchildren?

Richard Rorty

Praising people behind their back is monstrously unfair, because the one thing you can't defend yourself against is the good that people say about you.

Gregory David Roberts

There is nothing like death to say what is always such an artificial thing to say: The End.

Kurt Vonnegut

There's a fragment that goes, "Some say the most beautiful thing in the world is a great cavalry riding down over the hill. Others say it's a vast infantry on the march. But I say the most beautiful thing is the beloved." How political can you get?

Sam Hamill

Many people seem to have this double moral. They say one thing and then do another thing. They say that the climate crisis is very important and yet they do nothing about it.

Greta Thunburg

I struggle with how humankind ended up this way. We made ourselves slaves to money, and we all have to work and be a part of this thing when time is always ticking. And before we know it, a decade has gone by, and did I really get to do everything I wanted to do or say everything I wanted to say?