Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

From the very beginning, history wasn't content simply to be nostalgic fairytales; it wanted to make you think.

Even historians with knowledge of the event, and with the materials before them on which to form a judgment, see but little way into the causes and consequences of the great events in human history.

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

I study history in order to give an interpretation.

I don't think you learn specific lessons from history, but you do learn proportion.

History courses made up of all facts and no interpretation are guaranteed to put kids to sleep…. History comes alive when viewed as a patterned story open to ongoing debate.

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.

History has to be rewritten because history is the selection of those threads of causes or antecedents that we are interested in.

But every historical statement and legitimization itself moves within a certain relation to history.

Whatever can be noted historically can be found within history.

History is nothing but gossip about the past, with the hope that it might be true.

You can't say history teaches us this or that; it gives us more questions than answers, and many answers to every question.

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

The historian's job is to aggrandize, promoting accident to inevitability and innocuous circumstance to portent.

The problem of telling contemporary history is that your message gets outdated.

Events in the past may be roughly divided into those which probably never happened and those which do not matter. This is what makes the trade of historian so attractive.

History is too serious to be left to historians.

History is not just a story related by a fool.

Universal history is the history of a few metaphors.

History is the present. That's why every generation writes it anew. But what most people think of as history is its end product.

One test of a great work of history is does it make you feel like you have lived through the period

A good history covers not only what was done, but the thought that went into the action. You can read the history of a country through its actions.

Modern history is like a deaf person who is in the habit of answering questions that no one has put to them.

Writing history is writing the soul of the past...

History is nothing but assisted and recorded memory. It might almost be said to be no science at all