Those who weep for the happy periods they encounter in history acknowledge what they want: not the alleviation but the silencing of misery.
There is a history in all men’s lives.
The laws of history are as absolute as the laws of physics, and if the probabilities of error are greater, it is only because history does not deal with as many humans as physics does atoms, so that individual variations count for more.
The history of knowledge is a great fugue in which the voices of the nations one after the other emerge.
The history books do not remember the men who almost achieved greatness.
The historian’s duty is to separate the true from the false, the certain from the uncertain, and the doubtful from that which cannot be accepted.
The general history of art and literature shows that the highest achievements of the human mind are, as a rule, not favourably received at first.
Poetry is written with tears, novels with blood, and history with invisible ink.
It may help to understand human affairs to be clear that most of the great triumphs and tragedies of history are caused, not by people being fundamentally good or fundamentally bad, but by people being fundamentally people.
It is not the struggle of opinions that has made history so turbulent; but the struggle of belief in opinions.
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.
If history repeats itself, and the unexpected always happens, how incapable must Man be of learning from experience!
