Peter Gay Quotes

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

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

To converse with historians is to keep good company; many of them were excellent men, and those who were not, have taken care to appear such in their writings.

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

I write to learn the flow of history.

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.

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."

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 is the open Bible: we historians are not priests to expound it infallibly: our function is to teach people to read it and to reflect upon it for themselves.

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

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.

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.

Through searching out origins, one becomes a crab. The historian looks backwards, and finally he also believes backwards.

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

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.

Every historian discloses a new horizon.

History is only conjecture, and the best historians try to do it as accurately as they can. They try to accurately reassemble the facts and then put them down on paper.

So this was the big secret historians keep to themselves: historical research is wildly seductive and fun. There's a thrill in the process of digging, then piecing together details like a puzzle.

I study history in order to give an interpretation.

The task of understanding the past is neverending.

Historians are like deaf people who go on answering questions that no one has asked them