Augustine Birrell Quotes

History is the witness that testifies to the passing of time; it illumines reality, vitalizes memory, provides guidance in daily life and brings us tidings of antiquity

History didn't begin yesterday.

History takes time... History makes memory.

I love anything to do with history.

It takes an endless amount of history to make even a little tradition.

History is everything that has ever happened.

There can be no history without archives.

History is not everything, but it is the starting point. History is a clock that people use to tell their time of day. It is a compass they use to find themselves on the map of human geography. It tells them where they are, but more importantly, what they must be.

History always has a few tricks up its frayed sleeve. It's been around a long time.

The word “History” is mostly made up of the word “Story”.

I love historical references.

It's always good to be somewhere with some history, maybe that's England, which has a long history.

I like to make history.

The great eventful Present hides the Past; but through the din Of its loud life hints and echoes from the life behind steal in.

People are hungry for stories. It's part of our very being. Storytelling is a form of history, of immortality too. It goes from one generation to another. -Studs Terkel

No generation can escape history.

Time consecrates; and what is gray with age becomes religion.

Our roots are clinging, we shouldn't knock down so many old 'buildings.'

A recorded past is no more than a bygone present composed of the footprints made by human beings actually going somewhere but not knowing (in any extended sense), and certainly not revealing to us, how, they came to be afoot on these particular journeys.

But a man is not forgotten, as long as there are two people left under the sky. One, to tell the story; the other, to hear it.

It takes a lifetime to build tradition.

Only the story can continue beyond the war and the warrior. The story outlives the sound of the war drum... The story is our escort. Without it we are blind... It is the thing that sets us apart from cattle.

Antiquity! thou wondrous charm, what art thou? that being nothing art everything? When thou wert, thou wert not antiquity - then thou wert nothing, but hadst a remoter antiquity, as thou calledst it, to look back to with blind veneration; thou thyself being to thyself flat, jejune, modern! What mystery lurks in this retroversion? or what half Januses are we, that cannot look forward with the same idolatry with which we for ever revert! The mighty future is as nothing, being everything! the past is everything, being nothing!