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History Quotes

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History Quotes

“Man's mind cannot grasp the causes of events in their completeness, but the desire to find the causes is implanted in man's soul.”

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Book:WAR AND PEACE Complete Edition – All 15 Books in One Volume (World Classics Series): The Magnum Opus of the Greatest Russian Novelists and Author of Anna Karenina & The Death of Ivan Ilyich (Including the Biography & Memoirs of the Author)
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“Anyone, however, who has had dealings with dates knows that they are worse than elusive, they are perverse. Events do not happen at the right time, nor in their proper sequence. That sense of harmony with place and season which is so strong in the historian--if he be a readable historian--is lamentably lacking in history, which takes no pains to verify his most convincing statements.”

IfsKnowsHappensPainStrongHistoryEventsSeasonsHarmonyStatementsHistorianLackingRight TimeConvincingSequenceElusiveDealingsNo PainVerify
Book:To Think of Tea!
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“To rush in upon an event before its significance has had time to separate from the surrounding circumstances may be enterprising, but is it useful? ... The recent prevalence of these hot histories on publishers' lists raises the question: Should - or perhaps can - history be written while it is still smoking?”

ShouldMayStillsHistoryWrittenEventsCircumstancesHotRaisesListsSmokingSignificancePublishersEnterprising
Book:Practicing History: Selected Essays
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“Although it is tempting to imagine an ancient era innocent of biochemical weaponry, in fact this Pandora's box of horrors was opened thousands of years ago. The history of making war with biological weapons begins in mythology, in ancient oral traditions that preserved records of actual events and ideas of the era before the invention of written histories.”

YearsIdeasWarFactsHistoryRecordsImagineWrittenEventsHorrorWeaponsYears AgoTraditionAncientBoxesMythologyInventionInnocentErasTemptingWeaponryPandoraBiological WeaponsOral TraditionPandora's BoxWritten History
Author:Adrienne Mayor
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“This variety of objects will suspend, for some time, the course of the narrative; but the interruption will be censured only by those readers who are insensible to the importance of laws and manners, while they peruse, with eager curiosity, the transient intrigues of a court, or the accidental event of a battle.”

LawCoursesHistoryEventsObjectsReaderBattleImportanceCourtCuriosityVarietyMannersNarrativeIntrigueRoman EmpireTransientInterruptionsInsensible
Book:The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
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“It was the fashion of the times to attribute every remarkable event to the particular will of the Deity; the alterations of nature were connected, by an invisible chain, with the moral and metaphysical opinions of the human mind; and the most sagacious divines could distinguish, according to the colour of their respective prejudices, that the establishment of heresy tended to produce an earthquake, or that a deluge was the inevitable consequence of the progress of sin and error.”

MindHumansSinMoralOpinionHistoryProgressFashionEventsProduceDivineParticularConsequencePrejudiceErrorsConnectedInvisibleChainsInevitableColourRemarkableHuman MindAttributesEstablishmentMetaphysicalDeitiesHeresyEarthquakesRoman EmpireAlterationsDeluge
Book:THE HISTORY OF THE DECLINE AND FALL OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE (All 6 Volumes): From the Height of the Roman Empire, the Age of Trajan and the Antonines - to the Fall of Byzantium; Including a Review of the Crusades, and the State of Rome during the Middle Ages
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“When the world was half a thousand years younger all events had much sharper outlines than now. The distance between sadness and joy, between good and bad fortune, seemed to be much greater than for us; every experience had that degree of directness and absoluteness which joy and sadness still have in the mind of a child”

WorldYearsMindChildrenStillsJoyHalfHistoryGreaterSadnessEventsThousandDegreesDistanceFortuneThousand YearsGood And BadOutlinesBad FortuneJoy And Sadness
Author:Johan Huizinga
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“Geologists complain that when they want specimens of the common rocks of a country, they receive curious spars; just so, historians give us the extraordinary events and omit just what we want,--the every-day life of each particular time and country.”

WantGivingCountryCommonHistoryRocksEventsParticularExtraordinaryComplainingCuriousHistorianDay LifeGeologist
Book:Thoughts and Apophthegms: From the Writings of Archbishop Whateley
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“While the scientist, on the one hand, is concerned with giving a faithful description of facts, on the other, he has the equally important task of construing them in relation to some explanatory conjecture. Similarly the historian has a double duty: both of reporting the past as nearly as possible as it passed or was lived through by men at the time (without doctoring up events to fit later developments or some more "enlightened reading" of them); and second, of interpreting their import in the light of a present hypothesis.”

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Book:The judgment of history
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“Few will have the greatness to bend history itself; but each of us can work to change a small portion of events, and in the total; of all those acts will be written the history of this generation.”

ChangeCreativityHistoryCourageWrittenGenerationsEventsGreatnessDiversitySocial JusticeHistoricalPatriotismPatrioticHistorianPortionsWorld HistoryUs HistoryThis GenerationPositive ChangeChange For The BetterCourage To ChangeGreat HistoryInspirational HistoryChanges In History
Book:Make Gentle the Life of the World: The Vision of Robert F. Kennedy
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“There are no mistakes, no coincidences; all events are blessings given to us to learn from.”

LifeSpiritualGivenMistakeSilenceHistoryEventsBlessingEncouragementThis LifePositive AttitudeLife And DeathMaking MistakesCoincidenceThank YouLearning From MistakesLife DeathMy MistakesSynchronicityI Make MistakesLove And DeathWe All Make MistakesI Have Made MistakesCount Your BlessingsLosing A Loved OneLove DeathMy BlessingWe Make MistakesYour Purpose In LifeLearn From My MistakesMistakes And LearningSpiritual DeathMaking Mistakes And Learning From ThemLearning From Our MistakesSpirit Of LifeLearned From MistakesGiven LifeStained Glass WindowsCoincidence In LifeSpiritual InspirationEvents In Life
Author:Elisabeth Kubler-Ross
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“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.”

MayWholeCharacterFactsActionSpiritHistoryStudyTakenMinutesSpecialEventsHabitResearchPatientMannersNarrativeFaithfulnessSpectatorsUntrueNarratorsExactness
Book:France and England in North America: Pioneers of France in the New World. The Jesuits of North America in the seventeenth century. La Salle and the discovery of the Great West. The old régime in Canada
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“History is always written wrong, and so always needs to be rewritten. ...What is interesting is brought forward as if it had been central and efficacious in the march of events, and harmonies are turned into causes. Kings and generals are endowed with motives appropriate to what the historian values in their actions; plans are imputed to them prophetic of their actual achievements, while the thoughts that really preoccupied them remain buried in absolute oblivion.”

IfsNeedsActionValuesCausesInterestingHistoryPlansWrittenEventsKingsAchievementAbsolutesHarmonyHistoricalPlanningMotiveAppropriateMarchBuriedHistorianOblivionProphetic
Book:The Life of Reason: Human Understanding
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“"Historians of every generation, I believe, unless they are pure antiquarians, see history against the background - the controlling background - of current events. They call upon it to explain the problems of their own time, to give to those problems a philosophical context, a continuum in which they may be reduced to proportion and perhaps made intelligible."”

GivingBelieveMayMadeProblemI BelieveHistoryGenerationsEventsPurePhilosophicalCurrentsBackgroundsProportionHistorianContinuumCurrent Events
Author:Hugh Redwald Trevor-Roper
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“In historic events, the so-called great men are labels giving names to events, and like labels they have but the smallest connection with the event itself. Every act of theirs, which appears to them an act of their own will, is in an historical sense involuntary and is related to the whole course of history and predestined from eternity.”

MenGivingWholeCoursesNamesHistoryEventsGreatnessConnectionsEternityHistoricalLabelsRelatedGreat MenSmallestHistoricInvoluntaryPredestined
Author:Leo Tolstoy
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“The earth's becoming at a particular period the residence of human beings, was an era in the moral, not in the physical world, that our study and contemplation of the earth, and the laws which govern its animate productions, ought no more to be considered in the light of a disturbance or deviation from the system, than the discovery of the satellites of Jupiter should be regarded as a physical event in the history of those heavenly bodies, however influential they may have become from that time in advancing the progress of sound philosophy among men.”

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Book:Principles of Geology
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“Among the older records, we find chapter after chapter of which we can read the characters, and make out their meaning: and as we approach the period of man's creation, our book becomes more clear, and nature seems to speak to us in language so like our own, that we easily comprehend it. But just as we begin to enter on the history of physical changes going on before our eyes, and in which we ourselves bear a part, our chronicle seems to fail us-a leaf has been torn out from nature's record, and the succession of events is almost hidden from our eyes.”

MenHas BeensBookCharacterSeemsEyeScienceSpeakLanguageNatureHistoryClearRecordsFailingEventsCreationFailureBearsPeriodsApproachChaptersLeafsTornSuccessionMake OutChronicles
Book:A complete guide to the Lakes, comprising minute directions for the tourist, with mr. Wordsworth's Description of the scenery of the country, &c. and Three letters upon the geology of the Lake district, by prof. Sedgwick
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“To the scientist, nature is always and merely a 'phenomenon,' not in the sense of being defective in reality, but in the sense of being a spectacle presented to his intelligent observation; whereas the events of history are never mere phenomena, never mere spectacles for contemplation, but things which the historian looks, not at, but through, to discern the thought within them.”

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Author:Robin G. Collingwood
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