Quotes from Jacob Burckhardt

History is still in large measure poetry to me.

Power is of its nature evil, whoever wields it.

History is on every occasion the record of that which one age finds worthy of note in another.

Only the fairy tale equates changelessness with happiness...Permanence means paralysis and death. Only, in movement, with all its pain, is life.

Great men are necessary for our life, in order that the movement of world history can free itself sporadically, by fits and starts, from obsolete ways of living and inconsequential talk.

In history the way of annihilation is invariably prepared by inward degeneration, by decrease of life. Only then can a shock from outside put an end to the whole.

True universality does not consist in knowing much but in loving much.

Nothing in the world is better suited to laziness than orthodoxy. If you gag your mouth, stop up your ears and put a blinder over your eyes, you can sleep peacefully.

It is the historian's function, not to make us clever for the next time, but to make us wise forever.

The seventeenth century is everywhere a time in which the state's power over everything individual increases, whether that power be in absolutist hands or may be considered the result of a contract, etc. People begin to dispute the sacred right of the individual ruler or authority without being aware that at the same time they are playing into the hands of a colossal state power.

Thus what the word Renaissance really means is new birth to liberty—the spirit of mankind recovering consciousness and the power of self-determination, recognizing the beauty of the outer world and of the body through art, liberating the reason in science and the conscience in religion, restoring culture to the intelligence, and establishing the principle of political freedom.

The fates of people and of states, of entire civilizations, can depend on whether an extraordinary person can bring forth the proper strength of soul and action. Normal minds and spirits, no matter how numerous, cannot replace such a person.

Between the two lay a multitude of political units—republics and despots—in part of long standing, in part of recent origin, whose existence was founded simply on their power to maintain it.

Long voluntary subjection under individual Caesar and usurpers is in prospect. People no longer believe in principles, but will, periodically, probably believe in saviors.

Nema herojskog doba- postoje samo herojski ljudi.

every generation is equidistant from God.

By taking this stand, Burckhardt emerged in most refreshing contrast with his contemporaries and many of his successors. For what he developed was nothing short of a psychology of historiography. The historian is to observe, contemplate, and enjoy the incredibly glorious richness of the human experience. He is to look for human greatness and creativity everywhere, even in periods that might seem alien and distant from him.

A valuable possession of a people is its first heroic epic.

The exercise of liberty requires moral and intellectual virtues that oppose those habits fostered by the reigning economic, social, and cultural elites. The virtue most essential to liberty is self-control, yet the ruling principle behind egalitarianism, Hollywood-style hedonism, and unbridled materialism is the notion that one's appetites for pleasure and possessions should brook no limits.

a multitude destitute of will and of the means of resistance, but profitable in the utmost degree to the exchequer.

El auténtico descubridor. No obstante, no es el hombre que, tiene la suerte de tropezarse con alguna cosa, sino el hombre que encuentra lo que iba buscando.

El auténtico descubridor. No obstante, no es el hombre que, el primero, tiene la suerte de tropezarse con alguna cosa, sino el hombre que encuentra lo que iba buscando.

Aucun ouvrage de référence au monde, avec ses citations, ne peut remplacer le lien organique qu'une affirmation trouvée par nous-même établit avec notre intuition et notre attention, si bien qu'il se forme une véritable richesse pour notre esprit. »

The essence of tyranny is the denial of complexity.