Education Quote by Will Durant

Durant’s line flatters the intellect just long enough to undercut it. “Our knowledge” arrives as a collective achievement, then instantly becomes “a receding mirage,” something that looks like progress until you start walking toward it. The metaphor does more than preach humility; it sketches a psychology of modern learning, where every answer multiplies the number of questions worth asking. Knowledge doesn’t merely feel incomplete - it structurally produces new ignorance by expanding the perimeter of what can be known.

Calling ignorance a “desert” is a choice with teeth. Deserts aren’t romantic voids; they’re hostile, scale-less environments that swallow landmarks. Put a mirage in that terrain and you get a tidy indictment of intellectual complacency: we mistake clarity at a distance for arrival. The subtext is an argument against triumphal narratives of civilization - the idea that history is a ladder we’re steadily climbing. Durant, a historian of sweeping syntheses, knew how seductive big frameworks can be. He’s also warning the generalist about his own genre: the more you try to map “everything,” the more obvious the unmapped becomes.

Context matters: Durant wrote through the 20th century’s confidence in science and its simultaneous capacity for catastrophe. After world wars and technological leaps, “more knowledge” didn’t automatically translate into wisdom. The line works because it doesn’t scold curiosity; it dramatizes its cost. To learn is to discover how far you still have to walk, and to realize the horizon moves because you do.