A. B. Yehoshua Quotes

The task of understanding the past is neverending.

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

Each age tries to form its own conception of the past. Each age writes the history of the past anew with reference to the conditions uppermost in its own time.

History is on every occasion the record of what one age finds worthy of note in another.

One sought not absolute truth. One sought only a spool on which to wind the thread of history without breaking it.

I am a lay historian by nature. I seek out an empirical reflection of what truth is. I sort of want dates and motivations and I want the whole story. But I've always felt, unconsciously, that all human history is that connection from person to person to person, event to event to event, and from idea to idea.

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.

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

The dignity of history consists in reciting events with truth and accuracy, and in presenting human agents and their actions in an interesting and instructive form. The first element in history, therefore, is truthfulness; and this truthfulness must be displayed in a concrete form.

Whoever writes on world history, but not as a forensic history, becomes thereby an accomplice.

History is not what you thought. It is what you can remember. All other history defeats itself.

Confronted by an unknowable, historians demand evidence, witnesses, corroboration.

All historians are prisoners of their own experience. We bring to history the preconceptions of our personalities and our age.

No two historians offer precisely the same reading of an historical event; if we did, far fewer articles and books would be published.

There is a difference between remembrance of history and reverence of it.

A lot of what we think of as history is actually just a version of events which may or may not be true.

We knew in our gut that History needed to be more than a timeline.

Most academic historians accept that historians' own circumstances demand that they tell the story in a particular way, of course. While people wring their hands about 'revisionist' historians; on some level, the correction and amplification of various parts of the past is not 'revisionism' as it is simply the process of any historical writing.

The passion for the past is clearly about more than market forces or government policies. History responds to a variety of needs, from greater understanding of ourselves and our world to answers about what to do.

In history there's what's written down and there's what actually happened.

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

I like to think I'm a recovering historian.

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

It seemed to me, in some way, especially when you're looking back at distant historical events, the "Truth" with a capital "T" is kind of the juxtaposition of all the many, many, many truths that seem true to people at the time.

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.