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History Quotes

History quote from classy quote

Sometimes I get mail for people who lived in my home before I did, and sometimes my own body seems like a home through which successive people have passed like tenants, leaving behind memories, habits, scars, skills, and other souvenirs.

~ Rebecca Solnit

Rebecca Solnit 232 Body History Home Self

I came to see that man finds meaning in his existence only through the active demonstration of his human self, a cosmos comprising the entire constellation of life's factors: culture, civilization, tradition, history, ideals, facts, physical conditions, one's mental state, the ecology, and so on.

~ Pramoedya Ananta Toer

Pramoedya Ananta Toer Civilization Cosmos Culture Ecology Existence Facts History Human Ideals Indonesia Life Meaning Mental Physical Nature Tradition

The alchemists of past centuries tried hard to make the elixir of life: ... Those efforts were in vain; it is not in our power to obtain the experiences and the views of the future by prolonging our lives forward in this direction. However, it is well possible in a certain sense to prolong our lives backwards by acquiring the experiences of those who existed before us and by learning to know their views as well as if we were their contemporaries. The means for doing this is also an elixir of life.

~ Hermann Franz Moritz Kopp

Hermann Franz Moritz Kopp Alchemists Alchemy Effort Elixir Elixir Of Life Experience Historian History Life Life Extension Meaning Meaning Of Life Purpose Purpose Of Life Science Scientist Vain Views

History is the nothing people write about a nothing.

~ William Golding

William Golding History Importance Meaning Meaninglessness Nothing Nothingness People Unimportance

To deal with history [life] means to abandon one's self to chaos but to retain a belief in the ordination and the meaning. It is a very serious task.

~ Hermann Hesse

Hermann Hesse Chaos History Life Meaning

examination of its own history and of the forms of thought given the name “philosophy” indicates that “philosophy” has itself borne many fundamentally different meanings through the years, and from one school or movement to another.

~ Gregory B. Sadler

Gregory B. Sadler Definition History History Of Philosophy Meaning Philosophy

It can be very seductive to tell our story to others who will listen because, lets face it, who doesn't love to 'commiserate' (in this context, meaning to share their misery) with other likeminded people. It justifies our attachment to the drama. The interesting thing about telling our story over and over is that it becomes even more deeply ingrained in our minds each time we tell it, and the universe delights in keeping whatever we claim as our story alive.

~ Dennis Merritt Jones

Dennis Merritt Jones Complaining Fear History Limitations Past Saddness Storytelling

Do you realize that the past, starting from yesterday, has been actually abolished? If it survives anywhere, it's in a few solid objects with no words attached to them, like that lump of glass there. Already we know almost literally nothing about the Revolution and the years before the Revolution. Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street and building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And that process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the party is always right.

~ George Orwell

George Orwell History Past Present

It does not matter what I believe. The past is done. Hope is irrelevant. We measure success and failure in history with a cost of lives. Penicillin saved people, and the world wars exterminated them. Success and failure. Feelings, regrets, the point where they knew they made mistakes...it is interesting but unfortunately, irrelevant. Did they go to their death and grieve for what they did? Did the makers of the atomic bomb grieve for the destruction they dedicated their lives towards creating? Who cares? They did it. Whether they knew what they were creating, or whether they talked themselves into believing it was for the best, the glory of history is being able to view it in black-and-white. However honorable one's initial intention, a villain will always be a villain.

~ Caroline Hanson

Caroline Hanson Believing Black And White Death Destruction Disappointing Disaster Evil Failure Glory Grieve History Hope Humans Interesting Irrelevant Lives Mistakes Past People Regrets Success Uninteresting Valerie Dearborn Villain Wars

It is always perilous to suppose that the past is over and done with or that it can ever safely be disconnected from the pressing concerns of the present.

~ Christopher Kelly

Christopher Kelly Empire History Past Present

Once you realize your past is just a story, it no longer has any power over you.

~ Robert Tew

Robert Tew History Life Past Story

History is about the past. Yet it exists only in the present – the moment of its creation as history provides us with a narrative constructed after the events with which it is concerned. The narrative must then relate to the moment of its creation as much as its historical subject. History presents an historian with the task of producing a dialogue between the past and the present. But as these temporal co-ordinates cannot be fixed, history becomes a continuous interaction between the historian and the past. As such, history can be seen as a process of evaluation whereby the past is always coloured by the intellectual fashions and philosophical concerns of the present. This shifting perspective on the past is matched by the fluid status of the past itself.

~ Dana Arnold

Dana Arnold Historiography History Past Present

He who does not know his past cannot make the best of his present and future, for it is from the past that we learn.

~ Sheikh Zayed Al Nahyan

Sheikh Zayed Al Nahyan History Past

This happened back east of course. I've heard that term a lot since coming to this part of the country. But I never think of the term as a marker of geography. It's a reference to time, a statement about time, about all the densities of being and experience, it's time disguised, it's light-up time, shifting smoky time tricked out as some locus of stable arrangement. When people use that term they're talking about the way things used to be before they moved out here, the way the world used to be, not just New Jersey or South Philly, or before their parents moved, or grandparents, and about the way things still exist in some private relativity theory, some smoky shifting mind dimension, or before the other men and women came this way, the ones in Conestoga wagons, a term we learned in grade school, a back-east term, stemming from the place where the wagons were made. (pg.333)

~ Don Delillo

Don Delillo Geography History Past Speech The United States Time

There was something so heavy about the burden of history, of the past.

~ Sarah Dessen

Sarah Dessen History Past

The day we forget the horror, Sam, we will repeat it. Never forget your past. It will make you less human, less than human.

~ Katherine Reay

Katherine Reay Being Human Forget Forgetting History Horror Human Past Repeating The Past

knowing deep inside some ghosts are too cruel to question

~ Laura Wiess

Laura Wiess Ghosts History Past

Without archives many stories of real people would be lost, and along with those stories, vital clues that allow us to reflect and interpret our lives today.

~ Sara Sheridan

Sara Sheridan Archives Clues History Interpretation Lives Past Present Reflection Stories

Palaeontology is the Aladdin's lamp of the most deserted and lifeless regions of the earth, it touches the rocks and there spring forth in orderly succession the monarchs of the past and the ancient river streams and savannahs wherein they flourished. The rocks usually hide their story in the most difficult and inaccessible places.

~ Roy Chapman Andrews

Roy Chapman Andrews Aladdin History Palaeontology Past Science

My fascination with history is as much about the present as it is about the past.

~ Sara Sheridan

Sara Sheridan History Past Present

The present is the key to the past.

~ Archibald Geikie

Archibald Geikie Earth Geologist Geology History Past Present Rock Formations Rocks

you don't need to go that far in the future, you just have to go 2000 years ago

~ Paulo Coelho

Paulo Coelho 2000 Years Ago History Paolo Coelho Past The Zahir

If there is any good in life, in history, in my own past, I invoke it now. I invoke it with all the passion with which I have lived.

~ Elizabeth Kostova

Elizabeth Kostova Dracula Goodness History Life Passion Past

Oh, glorious Art! thus mused the enthusiastic painter, as he trod the street. Thou art the image of the Creator's own. The innumerable forms that wander in nothingness start into being at thy beck. The dead live again. Thou recallest them to their old scenes, and givest their gray shadows the lustre of a better life, at once earthly and immortal. Thou snatchest back the fleeing moments of History. With thee, there is no Past; for at thy touch, all that is great becomes forever present; and illustrious men live through long ages in the visible performance of the very deeds which made them what they are.

~ Nathaniel Hawthorne

Nathaniel Hawthorne Art History Painting Past

Permanence of instinct must go with permanence of form...The history of the present must teach us the history of the past.[Referring to studying fossil remains of the weevil, largely unchanged to the present day.]

~ Jean-Henri Fabre

Jean-Henri Fabre Biology Evolution Form Fossil History Instinct Past Science

They urge us to study our history that we might learn from past tragedies and errors. But sometimes I think it's actually a good thing that humanity so easily forgets. The haze that eventually claims old suffering often enables us to move on.

~ Richelle E. Goodrich

Richelle E. Goodrich Errors History Learn Mistakes Past Richelle Richelle Goodrich Study Tragedies

If history really forever repeats itself: then, it has always been then.

~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

Mokokoma Mokhonoana History Past Present

Living in the past, can only hold those who live there, as its prisoners.

~ Ellen J. Barrier

Ellen J. Barrier History Past Prisoners Time

What drew him back was something altogether more personal, to a history where, in the pain and longing of adolescence, he was still standing on the corner of Queen and Albert Streets waiting for someone that he knew would never appear. He had long understood that one of his selves, the earliest and most vulnerable, had never left this place, and this original and clearest view of things could be recovered only through what had first come to him in the glow of its ordinary light and weather...it was the light they appeared in that was the point, and that at least had not changed.

~ David Malouf

David Malouf Adolescence History Past Personal History Waiting

Why are we learning about the past, when this is History?

~ Galinda Glinda

Galinda Glinda Funny History Humor Past Random Wicked

History is indeed more than the register of crime,folilies and misfortune of mankind.

~ Peter Adejimi

Peter Adejimi Crime History Mankind Misfortune Past Politics Writing

To celebrate the Fourth of July meant something definite in those days.

~ Carol Ryrie Brink

Carol Ryrie Brink Fourth Of July History Independence Day Past

Who knows what's for true once a time is past? There's no way to prove how something was that's gone. And if a time is gone, what does it matter? It's all rain into rivers now.

~ Jo Dereske

Jo Dereske History Past The Past Truth

You can't just wipe away your history.

~ T.j. Klune

T.j. Klune Bear History Kid Otter Past Tj Klune

In the past, only some of the males, but all of the females, were able to procreate. Equality is more natural for females.

~ Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Nassim Nicholas Taleb Equality Equity Femininity Feminism History Past

The past is a distant, receding coastline, and we are all in the same boat. Along the stern rail there is a line of telescopes; each brings the shore into focus at a given distance. If the boat is becalmed, one of the telescopes will be in continual use; it will seem to tell the whole, the unchanging truth. But this is an illusion; and as the boat sets off again, we return to our normal activity: scurrying from one telescope to another, seeing the sharpness fade in one, waiting for the blur to clear in another. And when the blur does clear, we imagine that we have made it do so all by ourselves.

~ Julian Barnes

Julian Barnes History Past Truth

You don’t rewrite it, censor it, or edit it, to suit some warped view you have of the past and your own present.

~ V.t. Davy

V.t. Davy Arty Censor Channel Crime Detective Edit History Islands Nazi Past Present Rewrite Shaw Stasi

History isn't all fact--it's just the story the victors tell to keep themselves in power. And it's been a slow revision. The more time passes, the easier it becomes to reinvent the past.

~ Heather Anastasiu

Heather Anastasiu History Past Secret Secrets Stories Story The Past Time

It is a curious and painful fact that almost all the completely futile treatments that have been believed in during the long history of medical folly have been such as caused acute suffering to the patient. When anesthetics were discovered, pious people considered them an attempt to evade the will of God. It was pointed out, however, that when God extracted Adam's rib He put him into a deep sleep. This proved that anesthetics are all right for men; women, however, ought to suffer, because of the curse of Eve.

~ Bertrand Russell

Bertrand Russell Adam Adam And Eve Anesthetics Christianity Curse Eve Fact God History Medicine Painful Religion Suffering Superstition Treatment Yahweh

The common man wants nothing of life but health, longevity, amusement, comfort -- happiness. He who does not despise this should turn his eyes from world history, for it contains nothing of the sort. The best that history has created is great suffering.

~ Oswald Spengler

Oswald Spengler Greatness History Struggle Suffering
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