Explore the wonderful quotes under this tag
The practical value of history is to throw the film of the past through the material projector of the present on to the screen of the future.
Sep 17, 2025
The value of history is, indeed, not scientific but moral: by liberalizing the mind, by deepening the sympathies, by fortifying the will, it enables us to control, not society, but ourselves - a much more important thing; it prepares us to live more humanely in the present and to meet rather than to foretell the future.
That is the supreme value of history. The study of it is the best guarantee against repeating it.
The value of history. ..is that it teaches us what man has done and thus what man is.
History is for human self-knowledge. Knowing yourself means knowing, first, what it is to be a person; secondly, knowing what it is to be the kind of person you are; and thirdly, knowing what it is to be the person you are and nobody else is. Knowing yourself means knowing what you can do; and since nobody knows what they can do until they try, the only clue to what man can do is what man has done. The value of history, then, is that it teaches us what man has done and thus what man is.
The whole value of history, of biography, is to increase my self-trust, by demonstrating what man can be and do.
The perpetual stream of human nature is formed into ever-changing shallows, eddies, falls and pools by the land over which it passes. Perhaps the only real value of history lies in considering this endlessly varied play between the essence and the accidents.
All collections loaded