Georges-Louis Leclerc de Buffon Quotes

The story and study of the past, both recent and distant, will not reveal the future, but it flashes beacon lights along the way and it is a useful nostrum against despair.

The study of history, while it does not endow with prophecy, may indicate lines of probability.

As all historians know, the past is a great darkness, and filled with echoes.

The study of the past with one eye upon the present is the source of all sins and sophistries in history. It is the essence of what we mean by the word "unhistorical."

I am a lay historian by nature. I seek out an empirical reflection of what truth is. I sort of want dates and motivations and I want the whole story. But I've always felt, unconsciously, that all human history is that connection from person to person to person, event to event to event, and from idea to idea.

History is so indifferently rich, that a case for almost any conclusion from it can be made by a selection of instances.

Confronted by an unknowable, historians demand evidence, witnesses, corroboration.

As a historian, you can only go as far as the evidence will take you.

The historian does not locate known facts in a hypothetical, general pattern of processes; his aim is to link fact to fact, one unique knowable event to another individual one that begot it.

History is not only a particular branch of knowledge, but a particular mode and method of knowledge in other branches.

History is a tangled skein that one may take up at any point, and break when one has unravelled enough.

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

Hardly a pure science, history is closer to animal husbandry than it is to mathematics in that it involves selective breeding. The principal difference between the husbandryman and the historian is that the former breeds sheep or cows or such and the latter breeds (assumed) facts. The husbandryman uses his skills to enrich the future, the historian uses his to enrich the past. Both are usually up to their ankles in bullshit.

I decided that what I really wanted to do was to make my writing in history deeper, if that's the right word to use. And that is what I did.

There's no such thing as history, only historians. That's how we know about the past.

History must speak for itself. A historian is content if he has been able to shed more light.

History, in illuminating the past, illuminates the present, and in illuminating the present, illuminates the future.

An historian should yield himself to his subject, become immersed in the place and period of his choice, standing apart from it now and then for a fresh view.

I thought it necessary to study history, even to study it deeply, in order to obtain a clear meaning of our immediate time.

The best historian is he who combines knowledge of the evidence with the largest intellect, the warmest human sympathy and the highest imaginative powers.

Every historian discloses a new horizon.

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

To study history means submitting to chaos and nevertheless retaining faith in order and meaning.

We're uncomfortable about considering history as a science. It's classified as a social science, which is considered not quite scientific.

The task of understanding the past is neverending.