Paul Valery Quotes

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

I study history in order to give an interpretation.

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

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 write to learn the flow of history.

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

History is the shank of the social sciences.

All history must be mobilized if one would understand the present.

The comfortable thing about the study of history is that it inclines us to think hopefully of our own times.

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

History, which interprets the past to understand the present and confront the future is the least rewarding discipline for a dying species.

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

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.

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

As historians, we refuse to allow ourselves these vain speculations which turn on possibilities that, in order to be reduced to actuality, suppose an overturning of the Universe, in which our globe, like a speck of abandoned matter, escapes our vision and is no longer an object worthy of our regard. In order to fix our vision, it is necessary to take it such as it is, to observe well all parts of it, and by indications infer from the present to 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.

Leave history to historians.

We have need of history in its entirety, not to fall back into it, but to see if we can escape from it.

Whatever can be noted historically can be found within history.

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

Throughout the human experience people have read history because they felt that it was a pleasure and that it was in some way instructive. The profession of professor of history has taken it in a very different direction.