Christian Nestell Bovee Quotes

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

Maybe if we tell the truth about the past, we can tell the truth about the present.

For historians ought to be precise, truthful, and quite unprejudiced, and neither interest nor fear, hatred nor affection, should cause them to swerve from the path of truth, whose mother is history, the rival of time, the depository of great actions, the witness of what is past, the example and instruction of the present, the monitor of the future.

History is indeed the witness of the times, the light of truth.

Truth comes to us from the past, then, like gold washed down from the mountains.

Time flies, and what is past is done.

Who does not know that the first law of historical writing is the truth.

I am a strong believer that as one moves toward the future, the strongest and clearest way to do it is if you have a good sense of your past. You cannot have a very tall tree without deep roots.

Faithfulness to the truth of history involves far more than a research, however patient and scrupulous, into special facts. Such facts may be detailed with the most minute exactness, and yet the narrative, taken as a whole, may be unmeaning or untrue. The narrator must seek to imbue himself with the life and spirit of the time. He must study events in their bearings near and remote; in the character, habits, and manners of those who took part in them. He must himself be, as it were, a sharer or a spectator of the action he describes.

It is strange to talk of miracles, revelations, inspiration, and the like, as things past, while love remains.

The talent of historians lies in their creating a true ensemble out of facts which are but half true.

South Africa has faced many problems in the past. You would understand those problems if you understood the history of the struggle to get rid of Apartheid and the struggle to establish democracy.

We are divided of course between liking to feel the past strange and liking to feel it familiar.

Nothing can be forgotten. Nothing can be lost. The universe itself is one vast memory system. Look back and you will find the beginnings of the world.

The past is history, the future's a mystery.

Most of my influences are from the past.

It is up to us, to everyone at Celtic Park, to build up our own legends. We don't want to live with history, to be compared with legends from the past. We must make new legends.

Roads are a record of those who have gone before.

What is history, indeed, but a record of change?

Not a stone but has its history.

Freedom does not always win. This is one of the bitterest lessons of history.

In history, we are concerned with what has been and what is; in philosophy, however, we are concerned not with what belongs exclusively to the past or to the future, but with that which is, both now and eternally — in short, with reason.

There is no end to the deceits of the past.

To foretell the destiny of a nation, it is necessary to open a book that tells of her past.

The past exudes legend: one can't make pure clay of time's mud. There is no life that can be recaptured wholly; as it was.Which is to say that all biography is ultimately fiction.