Pierre Nora Quotes

Historians are left forever chasing shadows, painfully aware of their inability ever to reconstruct a dead world in its completeness however thorough or revealing their documentation. We are doomed to be forever hailing someone who has just gone around the corner and out of earshot.

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

History, as the study of the past, makes the coherence of what happened comprehensible by reducing events to a dramatic pattern and seeming them in a simple form.

As a child, I had loved history because it showed so many alternative worlds.

History does not produce definitive answers for all time. It is a process.

History can be helpful in making sense of the world we live in. It can also be fascinating, even fun.

I like to think I'm a recovering historian.

Even the most painstaking history is a bridge across an eternal mystery.

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

A historian is often only a journalist facing backwards.

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

Historians are dangerous and capable of turning everything upside down. They have to be watched.

I don't think we have all the words in a single vocabulary to explain what we are or why we are. I don't think we have the range of emotion to fully feel what someone else is feeling. I don't think any of us can sit in judgment of another human being. We're incomplete creatures, barely scraping by. Is it possible--from the perspective of this quickly spinning Earth and our speedy journey from crib to coffin--to know the difference between right, wrong, good, and evil? I don't know if it's even useful to try.

History is an indispensable even though not the highest form of intellectual endeavor.

I don't think history will ever be a science because history will never be reduced to law-like behavior. People are to unpredictable.

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

I have been always fascinated and seduced by history, which I think is very close, very close to literature.

I didn't remember what month that was, or what year even. I only knew the memory lived in me, a perfectly encapsulated morsel of a good past, a brushstroke of color on the gray, barren canvas that our lives had become.

History portrays everything as if it could not have come otherwise. History is on the side of what happened.

The middle sort of historians (of which the most part are) spoil all; they will chew our meat for us.

A few hints as to the craft may be useful to budding historians. First and foremost, get writing!

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

History ... with its long, leisurely, gentlemanly labors, the books arriving by post, the cards to be kept and filed, the sections to be copied, the documents to be checked, is the ideal pursuit for the New England mind.

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.

Gone, glimmering through the dream of things that were.