Quotes from Theodore Zeldin

France is an idea, not a territory. They pay more attention to intellectuals here; they give artists and writers the feeling they're valued.

The great thing about marriage is that it creates trust, the most precious of things.

I'm constantly astounded by the way people talk so openly to someone they don't know. They clarify in their own minds what is important to them, discover another person has similar problems, and create trust and even a friendship.

You have to accept that traditions exist, that people don't change their minds very quickly, that people are scared.

The world is... often terrifying, disgusting and tragic, but it is also beautiful. I should like to know how exactly each person would make it a tiny bit less disgusting and a tiny bit more beautiful.

Judaism is not a dogmatic religion but one which loves debate, in which scholarship has played a big part. Scholars never agree about anything.

The tendency of experts is to fiddle around with their expertise rather than trying to find new solutions.

What's missing from the world is a sense of direction.

The institution of marriage, if you look at it over many centuries, has come and gone.

To idolise a person means you don't get to know them, and the idea that you can become one is a myth, and it also means that you don't need to talk to one another because you're the same person.

television wears away the capacity to be astonished'.

A new way of looking is needed in a world which believes that every individual has a right to flower, within limits, in his or her own way.

To ignore what cannot be measured in precise numbers is like counting the stems in a bouquet of flowers while ignoring the indescribable perfume and beauty of each bud.

life could have been different if the meetings which have decided its course had been less silent, superficial or routine, if more thoughts had been exchanged, if humanity had been more able to show itself in them

To be a catalyst is the ambition most appropriate for those who see the world as being in constant change, and who, without thinking that they control it, wish to influence its direction.

literature must always be about gloom of one sort or another, on the principal that there is nothing interesting to be said about happy people.

The brain is full of lonely ideas, begging you to make some sense of them, to recognize them as interesting. The lazy brain just files them away in old pigeonholes, like a bureaucrat who wants an easy life. The lively brain picks and chooses and creates new works of art out of ideas.

Each civilization, each nation, each family, each profession, each sex and each class has its own history. Humans have so far been interested mainly in their own private roots, and have therefore never claimed the whole of the inheritance into which they were born, the legacy of everybody's past experience. Each generation searches only for what it thinks it lacks, and recognizes only what it knows already.

I particularly value conversations which are meetings on the borderline of what I understand and what I don't, with people who are different from myself.

The Renaissance… was based on a new idea of the importance of the individual. But this was a fragile foundation, because individuals depended on constant applause and admiration to sustain them. There is a shortage of applause in the world, and there is not enough respect to go around.

literature must always be about gloom of one sort or another, on the principle that there is nothing interesting to be said about happy people.

The fear of loneliness has been like a ball and chain restraining ambition, as much of an obstacle to a full life as persecution, discrimination or poverty. Until the chain is broken, freedom, for many, will remain a nightmare.

Everybody's style of speaking is a mixture of echoes dating from different epochs of the past: hers recalls the prudent and modest civil servants of the last century who were proud that they represented the state and who took care not to compromise themselves by saying the wrong thing.

A dream is what makes people love life even when it is painful.