Quotes About Insight

We do not just risk repeating history if we sweep it under the carpet, we also risk being myopic about our present.

We always admire the other person more after we've tried to do his job.

I go into my library and all history unrolls before me.

History does not always repeat itself. Sometimes it just yells, 'Can't you remember anything I told you?' and lets fly with a club.

But history is neither watchmaking nor cabinet construction. It is an endeavor toward better understanding.

The aim of the historian, like that of the artist, is to enlarge our picture of the world, to give us a new way of looking at things.

History tells us what people do; historical fiction helps us imagine how they felt.

The task of the historian is to understand the peoples of the past better than they understand themselves.

History thus becomes largely a study of character. Insight into temperament is hardly less important than the probing of "original materials."

History is a means of access to ourselves.

A book brings its own history to the reader.

This is always history's greatest failure, its inability to believe what it sees, what, almost always, someone sees.

Sometimes a book is better than it ever had a right to be because of the history the reader brings to the reading and because of the methods educators use to bring a particular story alive.

The advantages found in history seem to be of three kinds, as it amuses the fancy, as it improves the understanding, and as it strengthens virtue.

History is not just about the past. It also reveals the present.

The lesson of history is that no one learns.

The practical value of history is to throw the film of the past through the material projector of the present on to the screen of the future.

The study of History is the best medicine for a sick mind.

Hindsight's a wonderful thing. If we all had it there would be no history to write about.

And the revelation was a little like what saints receive on mountains - a further chapter in the history of the mystery.

Never stop reading. History doesn't repeat, but it does rhyme.

The history of discovery is full of creative serendipity.

I love history, doesn't matter what era, I'm fascinated.

We can only know where we're going if we know where we've been.