Source:(Google.com.pk)
history.gif (7470 bytes)
What follows are a series of quotations about history and the historian's craft. They have been culled from a variety of sources and they appear here in totally random order. Their purpose is to incite, energize and stimulate your historical imagination.
* * *
"'History,' Stephen said, 'is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.'" James Joyce
"Since history has no properly scientific value, its only purpose is educative. And if historians neglect to educate the public, if they fail to interest it intelligently in the past, then all their historical learning is valueless except in so far as it educates themselves." G. M. Trevelyan.
"To each eye, perhaps, the outlines of a great civilization present a different picture. In the wide ocean upon which we venture, the possible ways and directions are many; and the same studies which have served for my work might easily, in other hands, not only receive a wholly different treatment and application, but lead to essentially different conclusions." Jacob Burckhardt
"History is the witness that testifies to the passing of time; it illuminates reality, vitalizes memory, provides guidance in daily life, and brings us tidings of antiquity." Cicero
"The past is useless. That explains why it is past." Wright Morris
"Faithfulness to the truth of history involves far more than a research, however patient and scrupulous, into special facts. Such facts may be detailed with the most minute exactness, and yet the narrative, taken as a whole, may be unmeaning or untrue. The narrator must seek to imbue himself with the life and spirit of the time. He must study events in their bearings near and remote; in the character, habits, and manners of those who took part in them. He must himself be, as it were, a sharer or a spectator of the action he describes." Francis Parkman
"History . . . is indeed little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind." Edward Gibbon
"There is properly no history; only biography." Ralph Waldo Emerson
"The study of history is the best medicine for a sick mind; for in history you have a record of the infinite variety of human experience plainly set out for all to see; and in that record you can find yourself and your country both examples and warnings; fine things to take as models, base things rotten through and through, to avoid." Livy
"What experience and history teach is this-that people and governments never have learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it." G. W. F. Hegel
"Everything must be recaptured and relocated in the general framework of history, so that despite the difficulties, the fundamental paradoxes and contradictions, we may respect the unity of history which is also the unity of life." Fernand Braudel
"The function off the historian is neither to love the past nor to emancipate himself from the past, but to master and understand it as the key to the understanding of the present." E. H. Carr
"If you do not like the past, change it." William L. Burton
"History does nothing, possesses no enormous wealth, fights no battles. It is rather man, the real, living man, who does everything, possesses, fights. It is not History, as if she were a person apart, who uses men as a means to work out her purposes, but history itself is nothing but the activity of men pursuing their purposes." Karl Marx
"An historian should yield himself to his subject, become immersed in the place and period of his choice, standing apart from it now and then for a fresh view." Samuel Eliot Morison
"History is for human self-knowledge. Knowing yourself means knowing, first, what it is to be a person; secondly, knowing what it is to be the kind of person you are; and thirdly, knowing what it is to be the person you are and nobody else is. Knowing yourself means knowing what you can do; and since nobody knows what they can do until they try, the only clue to what man can do is what man has done. The value of history, then, is that it teaches us what man has done and thus what man is." R. G. Collingwood
"History is more or less bunk." Henry Ford
"That historians should give their own country a break, I grant you; but not so as to state things contrary to fact. For there are plenty of mistakes made by writers out of ignorance, and which any man finds it difficult to avoid. But if we knowingly write what is false, whether for the sake of our country or our friends or just to be pleasant, what difference is there between us and hack writers? Readers should be very attentive to and critical of historians, and they in turn should be constantly on their guard." Polybius
"You have reckoned that history ought to judge the past and to instruct the contemporary world as to the future. The present attempt does not yield to that high office. It will merely tell how it really was." Leopold von Ranke
"Time in its irresistible and ceaseless flow carries along on its flood all created things and drowns them in the depths of obscurity. . . . But the tale of history forms a very strong bulwark against the stream of time, and checks in some measure its irresistible flow, so that, of all things done in it, as many as history has taken over it secures and binds together, and does not allow them to slip away into the abyss of oblivion." Anna Comnena
"Only a good-for-nothing is not interested in his past." Sigmund Freud
"Every past is worth condemning." Friedrich Nietzsche
"The historian does simply not come in to replenish the gaps of memory. He constantly challenges even those memories that have survived intact." Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi
"Each age tries to form its own conception of the past. Each age writes the history of the past anew with reference to the conditions uppermost in its own time." Frederick Jackson Turner
Mr. Szasz was a professor of history at the University of New Mexico. He died in 2010 at the age of 70. He assembled this list of historical quotations for HNN in 2005.
Historical sense and poetic sense should not, in the end, be contradictory, for if poetry is the little myth we make, history is the big myth we live, and in our living, constantly remake.
Robert Penn Warren
History does not repeat itself. The historians repeat one another.
Max Beerbohm
To know the truth of history is to realize its ultimate myth and its inevitable ambiguity.
Roy P. Basler
[A] ny fool can make history, but it takes a genius to write it.
Oscar Wilde
Do not applaud me. It is not I who speaks to you, but history which speaks through my mouth.
Fustel de Coulanges
History must be written of, by and for the survivors.
Anonymous
History consists of a series of accumulated imaginative inventions.
Voltaire
The history of states and nations has provided some income for historiographers and book dealers, but I know no other purpose it may have served.
Borne
Clio, the muse of history, is as thoroughly infected with lies as a street whore with syphilis.
Schopenhauer
History, history! We fools, what do we know or care.
William Carlos Williams
History is now strictly organized, powerfully disciplined, but it possesses only a modest educational value and even less conscious social purpose.
J. H. Plumb
[History] may be called, more generally still, the Message, verbal or written, which all Mankind delivers to everyman.
Thomas Carlyle
History is a science, no more and no less.
J. B. Bury
The past is always a rebuke to the present.
Robert Penn Warren
A country without a memory is a country of madmen.
George Santayana
History is interim reports issued periodically.
Anonymous
Imagination plays too important a role in the writing of history, and what is imagination but the projection of the author's personality.
Pieter Geyl
History is philosophy teaching by example and also by warning. Lord Bolingbroke
History teaches everything including the future.
Lamartine
If you would understand anything, observe its beginning and its development.
Aristotle
With the historian it is an article of faith that knowledge of the past is a key to understanding the present.
Kenneth Stampp
History is something that happens to other people.
Anonymous
Any time gone by was better.
Jorge Manrique
There is no history of mankind, there is only an indefinite number of histories of all kinds of aspects of human life.
Karl Popper
The deepest, the only theme of human history, compared to which all others are of subordinate importance, is the conflict of skepticism with faith.
Goethe
History is not melodrama, even if it usually reads like that.
Robert Penn Warren
Who does not know that the first law of historical writing is the truth.
Cicero
History has become more important than ever because of the to unprecedented ability of the historical sciences to take in man's life on earth as a whole.
Alfred Kazin
The certainty of history seems to be in direct inverse ratio to what we know about it.
Anonymous
God alone knows the future, but only an historian can alter the .past.
Ambrose Bierce
History is ultimately more important than its singers.
Michael Harrington
Whoever wishes to foresee the future must consult the past; for human events ever resemble those of preceding times. This arises from the fact that they are produced by men who ever have been, and ever shall be, animated by the same passions, and thus they necessarily have the same results.
Machiavelli
Writing intellectual history is like trying to nail jelly to the wall.
William Hesseltine
History is the memory of things said and done.
Carl L. Becker
History is life; he who has not lived, or has lived only enough to write a doctoral dissertation, is too inexperienced with life to write good history.
Louis Gottschalk
History cannot give us a program for the future, but it can give us a fuller understanding of ourselves, and of our common humanity, so that we can better face the future.
Robert Penn Warren
There will always be a connection between the way men Late the past and the way in which they contemplate the present.
Buckle
History is the enactment of ritual on a permanent and universal stage; and its perpetual commemoration.
Norman O. Brown
The historian must not try to know what is truth, if he values his honesty; for if he cares for his truths, he is certain to falsify his facts.
Henry Adams
History is always written wrong, and so always needs to be rewritten.
George Santayana
What else can history teach us? Only the vanity of believing we can impose our theories on history. Any philosophy which asserts that human experience repeats itself is ineffectual.
Jacques Ellul
History is not the accumulation of events of every kind which happened in the past. It is the science of human societies.
Fustel de Coulanges
History is filled with the sound of silken slippers going downstairs and wooden shoes coming up.
Voltaire
History has to be rewritten because history is the selection of those threads of causes or antecedents that we are interested in.
O. W. Holmes, Jr.
The researches of many eminent antiquarians have already thrown much darkness on the subject; and it is possible, if they continue their labors, that we shall soon know nothing at all.
Artemus Ward
Nothing capable of being memorized is history.
R. G. Collingwood
A society in stable equilibrium is-by definition-one that ha~ no history and wants no historians.
Henry Adams
It should be known that history is a discipline that has a great number of approaches.
Ibn Khalduin of Tunis
When a historian enters into metaphysics he has gone to a far country from whose bourne he will never return a historian.
Shailer Mathews
A man rising in the world is not concerned with history; he is too busy making it. But a citizen with a fixed place in the community wants to acquire a glorious past just as he acquires antique furniture. By that past he is reassured of his present importance; in it he finds strength to face the dangers that lie in front of him.
Malcolm Cowley
We investigate the past not to deduce practical political lessons, but to find out what really happened.
T. F. Tout
That generations of historians have resorted to what might be called "proof by haphazard quotation" does not make the procedure valid or reliable; it only makes it traditional.
Lee Benson
The past does not influence me; I influence it.
Willem De Kooning
Very deep, very deep is the well of the past. Should we not call it bottomless?
Thomas Mann
Nothing falsifies history more than logic.
Guizot
History is a great deal closer to poetry than is generally realised: in truth, I think, it is in essence the same.
A. L. Rowse
I said there was but one solitary thing about the past worth remembering, and that was the fact that it is past-can't be restored.
Mark Twain
History is a myth that men agree to believe.
Napoleon
To converse with historians is to keep good company; many of them were excellent men, and those who were not, have taken care to appear such in their writings.
Lord Bolingbroke
History is the distillation of rumour.
Thomas Carlyle
It is the essence of the poor that they do not appear in history.
Anonymous
As history stands, it is a sort of Chinese play, without end andl without lesson. With these impressions I wrote the last line of my History, asking for a round century before going further.
Henry Adams
This I regard as history's highest function, to let no worthy action be uncommemorated, and to hold out the reprobation of posterity as a terror to evil words and deeds.
Tacitus
I don't believe the truth will ever be known, and I have a great contempt for history.
Gen. George Meade
History is the essence of innumerable biographies.
Thomas Carlyle
If the past has been an obstacle and a burden, knowledge of the past is the safest and the surest emancipation.
Lord Acton
History is the invention of historians.
Attributed to Napoleon
"History" is a Greek word which means, literally, just "investigation."
Arnold Toynbee
History will die if not irritated. The only service I can do to my profession is to serve as a flea.
Henry Adams
Myth, memory, history-these are three alternative ways to capture and account for an elusive past, each with its own persuasive claim.
Warren I. Susman
Inertia is the first law of history, as it is of physics.
Morris R. Cohen
The past does not repeat itself, but it rhymes.
Mark Twain
[History is] little else than a long succession of useless cruelties.
Voltaire
Man in a word has no nature; what he has. ..is history.
Jose Ortega y Gasset
In mass societies, myth takes the place of history.
William Bosenbrook
History is a great dust heap.
Thomas Carlyle
[History is] little more than the register of the crimes, follies and misfortunes of mankind.
Edward Gibbon
History is not a science; it is a method.
Charles Seignobos
All modern wars start in the history classroom.
Anonymous
History is the self-consciousness of humanity.
Droyson
It is very hard to remember that events now long in the past were once in the future.
Maitland
History is still in large measure poetry to me.
Jakob Burckhardt
Histhry is a post-mortem examination. It tellsye what a counthry died iv. But I'd like to know what it lived iv.
Mr. Dooley (Finley Peter Dunne)
History remembers only the brilliant failures and the brilliant successes.
Randolph S. Bourne
History will absolve me.
Fidel Castro
History in our kind of society is not a luxury but a necessity.
Patrick Hazard
In its amplest meaning History includes every trace and vestige of everything that man has done or thought since first he appeared on the earth.
James Harvey Robinson
History without politics descends to mere Literature.
Sir John Robert Seely
[History is] the most difficult of all the sciences.
Fustel de Coulanges
In schoolbooks and in literature we can separate ecclesiastical and political history; in the life of mankind they are intertwined.
Leopold von Ranke
History has a way of censoring contemporary values.
Anonymous
Anyone who is going to make anything out of history will, sooner or later, have to do most of the work himself. He will have to read, and consider, and reconsider, and then read some more.
Geoffrey Barraclough
We learn from history that we never learn anything from history.
Hegel
While the mediocre European is obsessed with history, the mediocre American is ignorant of it.
Anonymous
The voice of history is often little more than the organ of hatred or flattery.
Edward Gibbon
History is reading all that you can as fast as you can and - remembering as much as you can.
Lynn Berleffi Darr
History may defeat the Christ but it nevertheless points to him as the law of life.
Reinhold Niebuhr
History is not narration' as Thierry thought, nor analysis as Guizot thought, it is resurrection.
Michelet
Everyone falsifies history even if it is only his own personal history. Sometimes the falsification is deliberate, sometimes unconscious; put always the past is altered to suit the needs of the present. The best we can say of any account is not that it is the real truth at last, but that this is how the story appears now.
Joseph Freeman
He who has money, lives long: he who has authority, can do no wrong: he who has might, establishes right. Such is history! Ecce historia!
Gottfried Benn
Historians are to be read with moderation and kindness, and it is to be remembered that they can not be in all circumstances like Lynceus.
Quoted by Cotton Mather
Historians, it is said, fall into one of three categories:
Those who lie.
Those who are mistaken.
Those who do not know.
Anonymous
The course of History reflects a continual contest between limited, orderly processes of development and historical accident.
H. Cord Meyer
If history teaches anything about the causes of revolution-and history does not teach much but still teaches considerably more than social-science theories-it is that a disintegration of political systems precedes revolutions, that the telling symptom of disintegration is & progressive erosion of governmental authority, and that this erosion is caused by the government's inability to function properly, from which spring the citizens' doubts about its legitimacy.
Hannah Arendt
I often think it odd that it [history] should be so dull, for a great
deal of it must be invention.
Catherine Morland
In a word, we may gather out of History a policy no less wise than I eternal; by the comparison and application of other mens fore-passed miseries with our own like errours and ill-deservings.
Sir Walter Raleigh
[Some historians hold that history] is just one damned thing after another.
Arnold Toynbee
Years should not be devoted to the acquisition of dead languages or .to the study of history which, for the most part, is a detailed account of things that never occurred. It is useless to fill the individual with dates of great battles, with the births and deaths of kings. They should be taught the philosophy of history, the growth of nations, of philosophies, theories, and, above all, of the sciences.
Robert G. Ingersoll
History is not a work of philosophy, it is a painting; it is necessary to combine narration with the representation of the subject, that is, it is necessary simultaneously to design and to paint; it is necessary to give to men the language and the sentiments of their times, not to regard the past in the light of our own opinion.
Chateaubriand
[History is] a useless heap of facts.
Lord Chesterfield
The supreme purpose of history is a better world.
Herbert Hoover
A page of history is worth a volume of logic. O. W. Holmes
I am far too much in doubt about the present, far too perturbed .about the future, to be otherwise than profoundly reverential about the past.
Augustine Birrell
Happy people have no history.
Leo Tolstoy
Purely historical thought is nihilistic; it wholeheartedly accepts the evil of history.
Albert Camus
You must always know the past, for there is no real Was, there is only Is.
William Faulkner
There is properly no history, only biography.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
[History is] not factual at all, but a series of accepted judgments. Geoffrey Barraclough
History itself touches only a small part of a nation's life. Most of the activities and sufferings of the people ... have been and will remain without written record.
E. L. Wood word
Whatever is old corrupts, and the past turns to snakes.
Ralph W. Emerson
To look back upon history is inevitably to distort it.
Norman Pearson
The literature of the past is a bore.
O. W. Holmes
Life is not simple, and therefore history, which is past life, is not simple.
David Shannon
Skepticism is history's bedfellow.
Edgar Saltus
- See more at: http://hnn.us/article/1328#sthash.oOES78Me.dpuf.
Quotes About The Meaning Of Life Quotes Life Tumblr Lessons Goes on Is Short and Love God is Too Short is LIke a Camera is good.
.jpg)
No comments:
Post a Comment