Quotes About History

What you see isn't everything. If you want to understand what's happening before your eyes, look at the past. The present is the result of the past.

Yesterday is a history, today is only ours, tomorrow still unknown and is full of uncertainty. Live now and use yesterday to construct a beautiful tomorrow.

The past was never a mistake if you learned from it.

Life is a pen. You can cross out your past, but you can't erase it.

The so-called lessons of history are for the most part the rationalizations of the victors. History is written by the survivors.

We should not look back unless it is to derive useful lessons from past errors, and for the purpose of profiting by dearly bought experience.

One of the lessons of history is that nothing is often a good thing to do and always a clever thing to say.

NEVER forget where you came from it might save you from where you could end up.

But all that is past history. With the amazing advances in artillery, the wars of the future, if there are any, will be so short that peace will have been declared before there is time to put our lessons into practice.

Allt detta gjorde kyrkan i mina ögon till någonting helt annorlunda än staden i övrigt: en byggnad som, om man kan uttrycka sig så, var rest i fyra dimensioner - av vilka den fjärde var tiden - genom seklerna sträckande sitt skepp, som från travé till travé, från sidokapell till sidokapell tycktes erövra och överskrida icke endast några meter, utan den ena epoken efter den andra.

whether one day "Guermantes" itself may survive as anything other than a place-name, except to archaeologists who stop briefly in Combray,

One could see that the ideas which the mediaeval artist and the mediaeval peasant (who had survived to cook for us in the nineteenth century) had of classical and of early Christian history, ideas whose inaccuracy was atoned for by their honest simplicity, were derived not from books, but from a tradition at once ancient and direct, unbroken, oral, degraded, unrecognisable, and alive.

It's no more obsolete than the Iliad. I may

We can remember the truth because it bears a name, has roots in the past, but an improvised lie is quickly forgotten.

as those old engravings of the 'Cenacolo,' or that painting by Gentile Bellini, in which one sees, in a state in which they no longer exist, the masterpiece of Leonardo and the portico of Saint Mark's. We

all this made of the church for me something entirely different from the rest of the town: an edifice occupying, so to speak, a four-dimensional space—the name of the fourth being Time—extending through the centuries its ancient nave, which, bay after bay, chapel after chapel, seemed to stretch across and conquer not merely a few yards of soil, but each successive epoch from which it emerged triumphant,

they stand like giants immersed in Time.

the original of the copy they have in the Louvre.

social, and even individual differences are merged when seen from a distance in the uniformity of an epoch.

No doubt these geographical regions and the historic past that injected forest glades and Gothic steeples into their names had to a certain extent shaped their faces, their minds, and their prejudices, but had survived in them only as does the cause in the effect—that is, as something that can be unearthed by the intelligence but in no way perceived by the imagination.

But all that is a thing of the past. With the terrible advance of artillery, the wars of the future, if there are to be any more wars, will be so short that, before we have had time to think of putting our lessons into practice, peace will have been signed.

Cathedrals are to be adored until the day when, to preserve them, it would be necessary to deny the truths which they teach.

The Papacy, we are told, reckons by centuries, and indeed may perhaps not bother to reckon time at all, since its goal is in eternity.

Those years of my earliest childhood are no longer a part of myself; they are external to me; I can learn nothing of them save as we learn things that happened before we were born — from the accounts given me by other people.