Blaise Pascal Quotes

Those we call the ancients were really new in everything.

The past is the place we view the present from as much as the other way around.

History never looks like history when you are living through it.

Much of the wisdom of one age, is the folly of the next.

Most of us spend too much time on the last twenty-four hours and too little on the last six thousand years.

The past is really almost as much a work of the imagination as the future.

You never know how history is going to view things.

Two things have always been true about human beings. One, the world is always getting better. Two, the people living at that time think it's getting worse.

The beauty about history is that it's open to perception.

The history of mankind is the history of ideas.

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.

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

History is written backwards but lived forwards.

The difference between ancients and moderns is that the ancients asked what have we experienced, and moderns asked what can we experience.

What is amusing now had to be taken in desperate earnest once.

If you go back 150 years you are a reactionary; but if you go back 1000 years, you are in the foremost ranks of progress.

History needs distance, perspective. Facts and events which are too well attested cease, in some sort, to be malleable.

Time is a wonderful storyteller.

Reading recent history is good to humble yourself, and also to feel some hopefulness that there is progress.

Every true history must force us to remember that the past was once as real as the present and as uncertain as the future.

The subject of history is the life of peoples and mankind.

Nobody ever lived in the past.

The mountains of today are the molehills of tomorrow.