T. S. Eliot Quotes

Some of the most famous books are the least worth reading. Their fame was due to their having done something that needed to be doing in their day. The work is done and the virtue of the book has expired.

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

It is doubtless one of Aristotle's great services that he conceived so clearly the truth that literature is a thing that grows and has a history.

There are very few critics who have historical context or authority.

I think a book should be judged 10 years later, after reading and re-reading it.

Ancient histories provide windows to knowing current affairs.

The context of history proved invaluable.

Properly speaking, we learn from those books only that we cannot judge. The author of a book that I am competent to criticise would have to learn from me.

History is a strange experience. The world is quite small now; but history is large and deep. Sometimes you can go much farther by sitting in your own home and reading a book of history, than by getting onto a ship or an airplane and traveling a thousand miles.

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

He who stands most remote from his age is he who mirrors it best.

If we want to know history, I would think there would be every reason to.

A man is wise with the wisdom of his time only, and ignorant with its ignorance.

A critic knows more than the author he criticizes, or just as much, or at least somewhat less.

Those whom we call ancient were really new in all things, and properly constituted the infancy of mankind.

History illumes reality, vitalizes memory, provides guidance in daily life

The fact that your voice, amplified to the degree where it reaches from one end of the country to the other, does not confer upon you greater wisdom than when your voice reached only from one end of the bar to the other.

There's no such thing as history, only historians. That's how we know about the past.

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

Books have always a secret influence on the understanding.

Give me insight into today and you may have the antique and future worlds.

Get to know other worlds, if only for comparison.

Only the toad under the harrow knows where it pinches him.

Every work of Genius is tinctured by the feelings, and often originates in the events of times.

Those we call the ancients were really new in everything.