Arnold J. Toynbee Quotes

A life which does not go into action is a failure.

Thus three factors mark the transition from the old to the new society: a universal state as the final stage of the old society; a church developed in the old society and in turn developing the new; and the chaotic intrusion of a barbarian heroic age. Of these factors, the second is the most, and the third the least, significant.

Some historians hold that history is just one damned thing after another.

The sunsets and sunrises of civilization are inevitably separated by intervals of isolated darkness. The night that followed the Roman sunset was long and uncertain, and the turmoil it brought consumed countless man. But mankind itself did not yield. With its gaze fixed on a distant future, it persevered. Until the first rays of a new dawn at long last penetrated the horizon.

Man’s true end is to glorify God and to enjoy Him for ever.

Athens reacted to the population problem in a different way again. She specialized her agricultural production for export, started manufactures also for export and then developed her political institutions so as to give a fair share of political power to the new classes which had been called into being by these economic innovations. In other words, Athenian statesmen averted a social revolution by successfully carrying through an economic and political revolution; and, discovering this solution of the common problem in so far as it affected themselves, they incidentally opened up a new avenue of advance for the whole of the Hellenic Society.

The supreme accomplishment is to blur the line between work and play

We may express the historical function of the Abbassid Caliphate as a 'reintegration' or 'resumption' of the Achaemenian Empire-the reintegration of a political structure which had been broken up by the impact of an external force, and the resumption of a phase of social life which had been interrupted by an alien intrusion.

In every case the story opens with a perfect state of Yin. Faust is perfect in knowledge; Job is perfect in goodness and prosperity; Adam and Eve are perfect in innocence and ease; the Virgins — Gretchen, Danae and the rest — are perfect in purity and beauty. In the astronomer’s universe the Sun, a perfect orb, travels on its course intact and whole. When Yin is thus complete, it is ready to pass over into Yang.

Broadly speaking, however, Christianity is a universal church originating in a germ that was alien to the society in which it played its part, while Islam originated in a germ that was indigenous.

During the deep sleep of the interval (circa A.D. 375-675) which, intervened between the break-up of the Roman Empire and the gradual emergence of our Western Society out of the chaos, a rib was taken, from the side of the older society and was fashioned into the backbone of a new creature of the same species.

At the close of this century, the world would be dominated by the West, but that in the 21st century "India will conquer her conquerors."

The difference between a humanist and a lunatic is in fact one of degree

There may or may not be only one single absolute truth and only one single ultimate way of salvation. We do not know. But we do know that there are more approaches to truth than one, and more means of salvation than one.’’‘‘This is a hard saying for adherents of the higher religions of the Judaic family (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam), but it is a truism for Hindus. The spirit of mutual good-will, esteem, and veritable love … is the traditional spirit of the religions of the Indian family. This is one of India’s gifts to the world.

If we take the antiquity of Man to be something like 300,000 years, then the antiquity of civilizations, so far from being coeval with human history, will be found to cover less than 2 percent of its present span: less than 6,000 years out of 300,000 . On this time-scale , the lives of our twenty-one civilizations-distributed over not more than three generations of societies and concentrated within less than one-fiftieth part of the lifetime of Mankind- must be regarded, on a philosophic view, as contemporary with one another.