William Saroyan Quotes

What we end up calling history is a kind of knife, slicing down through time. A few people are hard enough to bend its edge. But most won't even stand close to the blade. I'm one of those. We don't bend anything.

History is the queen of the humanities. It teaches wisdom and humility, and it tells us how things change through time.

As a historian, I have learned that, in fact, not everyone who reaches back into history can survive it. And it is not only reaching back that endangers us; sometimes history itself reaches inexorably forward for us with its shadowy claws.

The task of understanding the past is neverending.

I write to learn the flow of history.

The one challenge you have when you're going back into history is that people, unlike with today's news - we think we know what's happened already - we think that it's history and therefore less interesting.

History is a string full of knots, the best you can do is admire it, and maybe tie it up a bit more. History is a hammock for swinging and a game for playing.

What is history? Its beginning is that of the centuries of systematic work devoted to the solution of the enigma of death, so that death itself may eventually be overcome. That is why people write symphonies, and why they discover mathematical infinity and electromagnetic waves.

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

All history involves selection, and it is always human beings who do the selecting.

Histories are as perfect as the Historian is wise, and is gifted with an eye and a soul.

History is the shank of the social sciences.

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

I was a terrible history student. They taught me history as if it were a visit to a wax museum or to the land of the dead. I was over twenty before I discovered that the past was neither quiet nor mute.

History can tell us what happened in the past. But it cannot assert that it must happen again in the future.

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

History, as an entirety, could only exist in the eyes of an observer outside it and outside the world. History only exists, in the final analysis, for God.

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

When I was a kid, I thought history was the most boring subject of all. I shouldn't blame my teachers; I should blame me, but I'll blame them.

I prefer my history dead. Dead history is writ in ink, the living sort in blood.

People tend to forget that the word "history" contains the word "story".

History after all is the true poetry.

I'm a man of history. My vision is guiding me, my clear vision. It is not by chance that the currents of peace are increasing daily inside Israel.

Leave history to historians.