Quotes About History

Time and space are but physiological colors which the eye makes, but the soul is light; where it is, is day; where it was, is night; and history is an impertinence and an injury, if it be any thing more than a cheerful apologue or parable of my being and becoming.

All history is biography.

The poets made all the words and therefore language is the archives of history, and, if we must say it, a sort of tomb of the muses. For though the origin of most of our words is forgotten, each word was at first a stroke of genius, and obtained currency because for the moment it symbolized the world to the first speaker and to the hearer. The etymologist finds the deadest word to have been once a brilliant picture. Language is fossil poetry.

All that we call sacred history attests that the birth of a poet is the principal event in chronology.

Beauty will not come at the call of a legislature, nor will it repeat in England or America its history in Greece. It will come, as always, unannounced, and spring up between the feet of brave and earnest men.

There is properly no history; only biography.

Let us affront and reprimand the smooth mediocrity and squalid contentment of the times, and hurl in the face of custom and trade and office, the fact which is the upshot of all history, that there is a great responsible Thinker and Actor working wherever a man works; that a true man belongs to no other time or place, but is the centre of things. Where he is, there is nature. He measures you and all men and all events.

Every man has a history worth knowing, if he could tell it, or if we could draw it from him.

The etymologist finds the deadest words to have been once a brilliant picture. Language is fossil poetry.

The creation of a thousand forests is in one acorn, and Egypt, Greece, Rome, Gaul, Britain, America, lie folded already in the first man.

All things are engaged in writing their history...Not a foot steps into the snow, or along the ground, but prints in characters more or less lasting, a map of its march. The ground is all memoranda and signatures; and every object covered over with hints. In nature, this self-registration is incessant, and the narrative is the print of the seal.

There is a relation between the hours of our life and the centuries of time.

Life lies behind us as the quarry from whence we get tiles and copestones for the masonry of to-day.

Nature will be reported. All things are engaged in writing their history. The planet, the pebble, goes attended by its shadow. The rolling rock leaves its scratches on the mountain; the river, its channel in the soil; the animal, its bones in the stratum; the fern and leaf their modest epitaph in the coal.

Man is explicable by nothing less than all his history.

Conservatives and Progressives. These two parties, which divide our government—and every other government—have been fighting for control of the world from the very beginning. History is the chronicle of their battles: between nobles and commoners, rulers and rebels, old traditions and new ideas, the rich and the poor. As the world turns, one side gets the upper hand, then the other, and back again. Only the names change.

Why all this deference to Alfred, and Scanderbeg, and Gustavus? Suppose they were virtuous; did they wear out virtue?

Those who have ruled human destinies, like planets, for thousands of years, were not handsome men.

Life lies behind us as the quarry from whence we get tiles and copestones for the masonry of to-day. This is the way to learn grammar. Colleges and books only copy the language which the field and the work-yard made.

I find that whatever is old corrupts, and the past turns to snakes. The reverence for the deeds of our ancestors is a treacherous sentiment. Their merit was not to reverence the old, but to honor the present moment; and we falsely make them excuses of the very habit which they hated and defied.

What is the foundation of that interest all men feel in Greek history, letters, art, and poetry, in all its periods, from the Heroic or Homeric age down to the domestic life of the Athenians and Spartans, four or five centuries later? What but this, that every man passes personally through a Grecian period.

Let us affront and reprimand the smooth mediocrity and squalid contentment of the times, and hurl in the face of custom, and trade, and office, the fact which is the upshot of all history, that there is a great responsible Thinker and Actor working wherever a man works; that a true man belongs to no other time or place, but is the centre of things. Where he is, there is nature.

The student is to read history actively and not passively; to esteem his own life the text, and books the commentary.

Wonder generates enthusiasm, which is the highest state of character. It's what makes mere curiosity about nature grow into an all-consuming passion. The history of science is full of examples of enthusiasm. Every schoolchild knows the story of Archimedes, who stepped into his bath and realized that water displacement could be used to measure the volume of any object; he then took off running through the streets like a madman, yelling, "Eureka! I've found it!