History Quotes

The tragedy about history - personally and globally - is that while we may learn it we rarely learn from it.

~ Rasheed Ogunlaru

When you make up your mind that you want to be Great, you have to learn about the Great people of the past, the Great people who changed the world, and the Great people of each respective category of absolutely everything you can think of. You have to saturate your mind in greatness. You literally have to get a degree in it. Greatness is a journey into those who have come before you. ‪

~ Tiffany Winfree

A person who is truly cool is a work of art. And remember, original works of art cost exponentially higher than imitations. Just take a look at the the coolest people in history. They will always be a part of history for being extremely original individuals, not imitations.

~ Suzy Kassem

The only principle which will make you more content, less bitter is to live a life that has Less excuses, more results. Less distraction, more focus. Less me, more we. Live with Gratitude not with Greytitude

~ Abhysheq Shukla

No man is educated for statesmanship who cannot see his time from the perspective of the past.

~ Will Durant

I do an awful lot of thinking and dreaming about things in the past and the future - the timelessness of the rocks and the hills - all the people who have existed there. I prefer winter and fall, when you feel the bone structure of the landscape - the loneliness of it, the dead feeling of winter. Something waits beneath it, the whole story doesn't show.

~ Andrew Wyeth

An artist can respect the backfield of fact before which every human being stands and choose not to address those facts.

~ Tom Bissell

Dignity is not a symbol bestowed on man, nor does the word itself possess force. Man's dignity is a force and the only modus vivendi by which man and his history survive. When mid-twentieth century Germany did not let man live and die with this right, man became an animal. No matter how technologically advanced or sophisticated, when man negates this divine right, he not only becomes self-destructive, but castrates his history and poisons our future. This is what 'The Nazi Drawings' are about.

~ Mauricio Lasansky

The riders, clad in crimson and black, stopped to scan the maze. Blaise shrank into the hedge, but one keen-eyed hunter spied him. He raised his crossbow, took careful aim and fired.

~ Teresa Flavin

Indeed, the future is signalled in the past, but time has to pass to see it. Art is the witness.BLOG post-Perpetual Beginning-November 14 2011

~ Kathryn Brimblecombe-Fox

With the plundered people transferring their energies into relaxed and receptive thoughts, degradation and lust for power produced art.

~ Peter Weiss

On a cement pediment stands the inevitable bronze statue of a man in a cheap suit.

~ Alex Shakar

When Design become Useless it becomes Art. Yesterday's Artisans are today's Artists.

~ Vineet Raj Kapoor

Age in itself gives substance — what has lasted becomes a thing worth keeping. An older poem's increasing strangeness of language is part of its beauty, in the same way that the cracks and darkening of an old painting become part of its luminosity in the viewer’s mind.

~ Jane Hirshfield

Thus all art is propaganda and ever must be, despite the wailing of the purists. I stand in utter shamelessness and say that whatever art I have for writing has been used always for propaganda for gaining the right of black folk to love and enjoy. I do not care a damn for any art that is not used for propaganda. But I do care when propaganda is confined to one side while the other is stripped and silent.

~ W.e.b. Du Bois

Paris, however―because of her purely fortuitous beauty, because of the old things which have become a part of her, because of her entanglement of buildings and tenements―Paris yields herself in discovery as an attic beloved in our childhood gave up its secrets.

~ Jean Cocteau

But what is the use of the humanities as such? Admittedly they are not practical, and admittedly they concern themselves with the past. Why, it may be asked, should we engage in impractical investigations, and why should we be interested in the past? The answer to the first question is: because we are interested in reality. Both the humanities and the natural sciences, as well as mathematics and philosophy, have the impractical outlook of what the ancients called vita contemplativa as opposed to vita activa. But is the contemplative life less real or, to be more precise, is its contribution to what we call reality less important, than that of the active life? The man who takes a paper dollar in exchange for twenty-five apples commits an act of faith, and subjects himself to a theoretical doctrine, as did the mediaeval man who paid for indulgence. The man who is run over by an automobile is run over by mathematics, physics and chemistry. For he who leads the contemplative life cannot help influencing the active, just as he cannot prevent the active life from influencing his thought. Philosophical and psychological theories, historical doctrines and all sorts of speculations and discoveries, have changed, and keep changing, the lives of countless millions. Even he who merely transmits knowledge or learning participates, in his modest way, in the process of shaping reality - of which fact the enemies of humanism are perhaps more keenly aware than its friends. It is impossible to conceive of our world in terms of action alone. Only in God is there a Coincidence of Act and Thought as the scholastics put it. Our reality can only be understood as an interpenetration of these two.

~ Erwin Panofsky

linear brains can't curve a thought.

~ Douglas M Laurent

The past does not influence me, I influence it.

~ Willem De Kooning

When we create, we become stronger. When we create, we feel better. When we create, we can use our own two hands to create a new world. And this new world will be as we want it to be.

~ Valentina Knurova

We, as we read, must become Greeks, Romans, Turks, priest and king, martyr and executioner; must fasten these images to some reality in our secret experience, or we shall learn nothing rightly.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Shelves full of books are all around me. Opening the different volumes I take a look, and find the pages covered with writings in unknown scripts — tadpole traces, bird feet markings, twisted branches. And in my dream I am able to read them all, to make sense of everything despite its difficulty.

~ Jonathan D. Spence

What must not be read must not be written.

~ Melita Tessy

You have not studied the histories of ancient times, and perhaps know not the life that breathes in them; a soul of beauty and wisdom which had penetrated my heart of hearts.

~ Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

I do not think that there can ever be enough books about anything; and I say that knowing that some of them are going to be about Pilates. The more knowledge, the better seems like the a solid rule of thumb, even though I have watched enough science fiction films to accept that humanity's unchecked pursuit of learning will end with robots taking over the world.

~ Sarah Vowell

Tempestuous plains tell the tale,Windswept wastes do bewail,Haunting Spirit of the land,Seeks the living, seeks the damned.Horizoned edge sheared with grass, Dark Storm Rising in the pass,Ageless Spirit seeks the path,To torment souls to the last.Brooding Spirit upon the plain,Thunderhead gathers for the rain. Light grows dim then bolts with pain,On dry Earth her sin is stained.(Frightened creatures do stampede,Into night, they do recede).Ungodded hand on seasoned blade,Reaps the harvest of the Age.Released from her eternal din,Spirit of the Age rises again.Seeking to plunder and consume, Those who were proud, those who presumed.Spirits rage while storm draws nigh,Upon burning plain and emblazoned sky.It is said giants grapple in the Earth so deep,To contend for souls that they might keep. The Storm spirit now searches the high and the low,To seek her manchild victim in the fields below.Leaves bad wasteland to claim but a fallen man,Denying it Heaven, crowning it, ‘Son of the Damned.’Treacherous Spirit of the far lost night, Tramples souls down denying them light.Storm seethes with furious hiss,Leads men on to bottomless pit.This most ancient of foes has come from her den,To seek the living, to make ready those dead. A living sacrifice is her soul desire,To snatch the soul for black funeral pyre.A double-damned devil, that is she,This one who lies, who claims to make free.A lying spirit, that is her domain, A storm-wracked Fury of self-proclaim.Onward she seeks, this bleak Northern wind,Searching for naught but for a soul akin.Amidst the howling and the rage,To murder again, that is her trade. As this spirit of graves left the plain,She left a wake of dead in shrouded train. Now down from the plain Storm did come,Unto those cities wherein was no sun.There with whirlwind she did rip and scour, For those souls of whom she could tear and devour.She comes to seek the living and the dead,Those who were frightened, those with no dread.Thus upon those she did acclaim,“I am the Mistress of the living and the slain.” O’ haunting Spirit of this land,Taker of life, maker of the damned. --On Villainess Storm, Ch. One Valley of the Damned

~ Douglas M Laurent

If reason ruled the world would history even exist?

~ Ryszard Kapuściński

Genius, throughout history, has been found difficult to classify because it varies in amount: It's rare to find a genius in the context of the noun, but most people, if not all, have a bit of genius in them in the context of the adjective.

~ Criss Jami

...you sometimes note an impatience on the part of a specialist that the public does not show sufficient interest in his assemblage of information as such. He is likely to conclude that the average person is somewhat stupid. The opposite is true. It is a sign of native intelligence on the part of any person not to clutter his mind with indigestibles.

~ Freeman Tilden

Like a lot of stupid people, it took a great deal to get an idea into the king's head, but once there, there was no shifting it.

~ Richard Killeen

The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.

~ George Orwell

Every moment happens twice: inside and outside, and they are two different histories.

~ Zadie Smith

I was alive when the Dead Sea was just a lake that was feeling a little poorly.

~ Cassandra Clare

Never say more than is necessary.

~ Richard Brinsley Sheridan

We'll be remembered more for what we destroy than what we create.

~ Chuck Palahniuk

History, like love, is so apt to surround her heroes with an atmosphere of imaginary brightness.

~ James Fenimore Cooper

History is always written by the winners. When two cultures clash, the loser is obliterated, and the winner writes the history books-books which glorify their own cause and disparage the conquered foe. As Napoleon once said, 'What is history, but a fable agreed upon?

~ Dan Brown

Study the past if you would define the future.

~ Confucius

We are all fools in love

~ Jane Austen

One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.

~ Carl Sagan