Ellen Terry Quotes

What is a diary as a rule? A document useful to the person who keeps it. Dull to the contemporary who reads it and invaluable to the student, centuries afterwards, who treasures it.

I've been keeping diaries for 27 years.

A diary is a way of hedging one’s bets against death.

If there was a day that history was not recorded, then the history of one hundred days would be in peril.

Read no history: nothing but biography, for that is life without theory.

Very few things happen at the right time, and the rest do not happen at all. The conscientious historian will correct these defects.

I think it's important to have some documentation of the past.

Antiquities are history defaced, or some remnants of history which have casually escaped the shipwreck of time.

History happens to one person at a time.

My albums really are like scrapbooks to me.

Everyone should keep someone else's diary.

Biography is the best form of history.

When you are in the future, the past looks different.

In the end, we journalists try - or should try - to be the first impartial witnesses of history. If we have any reason for our existence, the least must be our ability to report history as it happens so that no one can say: 'we didn't know - no one told us.'

History is strewn with the wrecks of nations which have gained a little progressiveness at the cost of a great deal of hard manliness, and have thus prepared themselves for destruction as soon as the movements of the world gave a chance for it.

Time removes distress.

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

The tourists who come to our island take in the Monarchy along with feeding the pigeons in Trafalgar Square.

The past and the present are within the field of my inquiry, but what a man may do in the future is a hard question to answer.

An epoch is but a swing of the pendulum; and each generation thinks the world is progressing because it is always moving.

Events are as much the parents of the future as they were the children of the past.

All true histories contain instruction; though, in some, the treasure may be hard to find, and when found, so trivial in quantity, that the dry, shriveled kernel scarcely compensates for the trouble of cracking the nut.

The past is a country from which we have all emigrated

History hath triumphed over time, which besides it nothing but eternity hath triumphed over.

The Past is utterly indifferent to its worshippers.