Quotes About History

Soho has got to be at its centre. It's got such a history for rock, pop, poetry, jazz, writers, all those things, and I think it should be valued as such, and protected as this centre for bohemia.

History is still in large measure poetry to me.

In the history of old Jewish literature there was never any basic difference between the poet and the prophet. Our ancient poetry often became law and a way of life.

It is barbaric to write poetry after Auschwitz.

We are never real historians, but always near poets, and our emotion is perhaps nothing but an expression of a poetry that was lost.

The poet may say or sing, not as things were, but as they ought to have been; but the historian must pen them, not as they ought to have been, but as they really were.

It is part of my creed that the only poetry is history, could we tell it right.

The aim of art is almost divine: to bring to life again if it is writing history, to create if it is writing poetry.

If history is a record of survivors, Poetry shelters other voices.

In its youth a people produce mythology and poetry; in its decadence, philosophy and logic.

I am very fond of the people, landscape, poetry, music, history and the Guinness. Being there makes me think of my mother and my grandmother - always sentimental and warm thoughts.

A man of eighty has outlived probably three new schools of painting, two of architecture and poetry and a hundred in dress.

The poetry from the eighteenth century was prose; the prose from the seventeenth century was poetry.

The social revolution...cannot draw its poetry from the past, but only from the future. It cannot begin with itself before it has stripped itself of all superstitions concerning the past.

If epic poetry is a definite species, the sagas do not fall within it.

In my opinion we learn nothing from history except the infinite variety of men's behaviour. We study it, as we listen to music or read poetry, for pleasure, not for instruction.

There were poets before Homer.

But poetry is a way of language, it is not its subject or its maker's background or interests or hobbies or fixations. It is nearer to utterance than history.

History is a great deal closer to poetry than is generally realised: in truth, I think, it is in essence the same.

Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs?

The Old Testament is full of poetry, prophecies, chronicles, documentations, storytelling, fairytales.

At certain periods of history it is only poetry that is capable of dealing with reality by condensing it into something graspable, something that otherwise wouldn't be retained by the mind.

Only times and places, only names and ghosts.

Poetry has been the guardian angel of humanity in all ages.