Hoyt & Roberts, comps. Hoyt’s New Cyclopedia of Practical Quotations. 1922.
History
Happy is the nation without a history.
Beccaria—Trattato dei Delitti e delle Pene (Treatise of Crimes and of Punishment). Introduction.
History is a pageant, not a philosophy.
Augustine Birrell—Obiter Dicta. The Muse of History.
I have read somewhere or other, in Dionysius of Halicarnassus, I think, that history is philosophy teaching by examples.
Lord Bolingbroke (Henry St. John)—On the Study and Use of History. Letter 2. Also quoted by Carlyle—Essays. History.
The dignity of history.
Lord Bolingbroke (Henry St. John)—On the Study and Use of History. Letter V. Fielding—Tom Jones. Bk. XI. Ch. II.
What want these outlaws conquerors should have
But History’s purchased page to call them great?
Byron—Childe Harold. Canto III. St. 48.
And history with all her volumes vast,
Hath but one page.
Byron—Childe Harold. Canto IV. St. 108.
Histories are as perfect as the Historian is wise, and is gifted with an eye and a soul.
Carlyle—Cromwell’s Letters and Speeches. Introduction. Ch. I.
History, a distillation of rumor.
Carlyle—French Revolution. Pt. I. Bk. VII. Ch. V.
History is the essence of innumerable Biographies.
Carlyle—Essays. On History.
In a certain sense all men are historians.
Carlyle—Essays. On History.
History, as it lies at the root of all science, is also the first distinct product of man’s spiritual nature; his earliest expression of what can be called Thought.
Carlyle—Essays. On History.
All history … is an inarticulate Bible.
Carlyle—Latter Day Pamphlets. 405.
All history is a Bible—a thing stated in words by me more than once.
Carlyle—Quoted in Froude’s Early Life of Carlyle.
Happy the People whose Annals are blank in History-Books.
Carlyle—Life of Frederick the Great. Bk. XVI. Ch. I.
Que voulez-vous de plus? Il a inventé l’histoire.
What more would you have? He has invented history.
Madame Du Deffand of Voltaire, who was accused by critics of lack of invention. See Fourier—L’Esprit dans Histoire. P. 141.
The contact with manners then is education; and this Thucydides appears to assert when he says history is philosophy learned from examples.
Dionysius of Halicarnassus—Ars Rhetorica. XI. 2. P. 212. (Tauchnitz Ed.) See Thucydides—Works. I. 22.
Assassination has never changed the history of the world.
Benj. Disraeli—Speech. May, 1865.
There is properly no history, only biography.
Emerson—Essays. History.
The reign of Antoninus is marked by the rare advantage of furnishing very few materials for history, which is indeed little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind.
Gibbon—Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. (1776). Ch. III.
And read their history in a nation’s eyes.
Gray—Elegy in a Country Churchyard. St. 16.
The long historian of my country’s woes.
Homer—Odyssey. Bk. III. L. 142. Pope’s trans.
History casts its shadow far into the land of song.
Longfellow—Outre-Mer. Ancient Spanish Ballads.
They who live in history only seemed to walk the earth again.
Longfellow—The Belfry of Bruges. St. 9.
I shall cheerfully bear the reproach of having descended below the dignity of history.
Macaulay—History of England. Vol. I. Ch. I.
Happy the people whose annals are tiresome.
Montesquieu.
[History] hath triumphed over Time, which besides it, nothing but Eternity hath triumphed over.
Sir Walter Raleigh—The History of the World. Preface.
In a word, we may gather out of history a policy no less wise than eternal; by the comparison and application of other men’s forepassed miseries with our own like errors and ill deservings.
Sir Walter Raleigh—History of the World. Preface. Par. IX.
Die Weltgeschichte ist das Weltgericht.
The world’s history is the world’s judgment.
Schiller—Resignation. 17.
Der Historiker ist ein rückwärts gekehrter Prophet.
The historian is a prophet looking backwards.
Schlegel—Athenæum. Berlin. I. 2. 20.
Præcipium munus annalium reor, ne virtutes sileantur, utque pravis dictis, factisque ex posteritate et infamia metus sit.
The principal office of history I take to be this: to prevent virtuous actions from being forgotten, and that evil words and deeds should fear an infamous reputation with posterity.
Tacitus—Annales. III. 65.
L’histoire n’est que le tableau des crimes et des malheurs.
History is only the register of crimes and misfortunes.
Voltaire—L’Ingénu. X.
Oh do not read history, for that I know must be false.
Robert Walpole. I. Walpoliana. No. CXLI. Also in Advertisement to Letters to Horace Mann.
Those old credulities, to nature dear,
Shall they no longer bloom upon the stock
Of History.
Wordsworth—Memorials of a Tour in Italy. IV. At Rome.