Quotes from Benedetto Croce

All history is contemporary history.

History is various and sinuous and no essential part of the human spirit is ever wholly absent from it.

The writing of histories - as Goethe once noted - is one way of getting rid of the weight of the past.... The writing of history liberates us from history.

Art is ruled uniquely by the imagination.

Historical judgement is not a variety of knowledge, it is knowledge itself; it is the form which completely fills and exhausts the field of knowing, leaving no room for anything else.

Every true history is contemporary history.

The writing of histories - as Goethe once noted - is one way of getting rid of the weight of the past.... The writing of history liberates us from history.

We are products of the past and we live immersed in the past, which encompasses us. How can we move towards the new life, how create new activities without getting out of the past and without placing ourselves above it? And how can we place ourselves above the past if we are in it and it is in us? There is no other way out except through thought, which does not break off relations with the past but rises ideally above it and converts it into knowledge.

Art is a true aesthetic synthesis , "a priori" of feeling and image in the intuition, as to which it may be repeated that feeling without image is blind, and image without feeling is void.

All history is contemporary history.

Burdening is the one who takes away our solitude but does not give us company.

We shall not understand the history of men and of other times unless we ourselves are alive to the requirements which that history satisfied, nor will our successors understand the history of our time unless they fulfill these conditions.

Un pensatore che non soffra il suo problema e non viva il suo pensiero, non è un pensatore ma un retore, ripetitore di formole che furono pensieri già pensati in passato da altri.

bisognerebbe mettere in croce, a trent'anni, ogni fanatico, perché colui che è stato un illuso, rinsavito, si converte in briccone

Economy is the aestethic of practical life - morality is its logic

L'onestà politica non è altro che la capacità politica.

Unless a capacity for thinking be accompanied by a capacity for action, a superior mind exists in torture.

We shall not understand the history of men and other times unless we ourselves are alive to the requirements which that history satisfied.

The translation called good has original value as a work of art.

Art is what everyone knows it is.