Biography is the only true history. [ Carlyle ]
History is but a fable agreed upon. [ Napoleon I ]
An old novel has a history of its own. [ Alexander Smith ]
Biography is the best form of history. [ H. W. Shaw ]
History is the conscience of humanity. [ E. de Girardin ]
Antiquity is the aristocracy of History. [ A. Dumas pere ]
History is the revelation of Providence. [ Kossuth ]
There is a kind of character in thy life,
That to the observer doth thy history
Fully unfold. [ William Shakespeare ]
The history of a man is in his character. [ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ]
Ay me! for aught that ever I could read,
Could ever hear by tale or history,
The course of true love never did run smooth. [ William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night's Dream ]
There is properly no history, only biography. [ Emerson ]
All human history attests
That happiness for man - the hungry sinner —
Since Eve ate apples, much depends on dinner! [ Byron ]
Every day in thy life is a leaf in thy history. [ Arab. Proverb ]
Poetry comes nearer to vital truth than history. [ Plato ]
History is only a record of crimes and misfortunes. [ Voltaire ]
Kind messages, that pass from land to land;
Kind letters, that betray the heart's deep history.
In which we feel the pressure of a hand,
One touch of fire - and all the rest is mystery! [ Longfellow ]
Some one calls biography the home aspect of history. [ Beecher ]
Great women belong to history and to self-sacrifice. [ Leigh Hunt ]
Love's history, as life's, is ended not by marriage. [ Bayard Taylor ]
Fiction may be said to be the caricature of history. [ Edward Bulwer-Lytton ]
History, however written, is always a pleasure to us. [ Pliny ]
The history of the world is the judgment of the world. [ Friedrich Schiller ]
Assassination has never changed the history of the world. [ Beaconsfield ]
Was never secret history but birds tell it in the bowers. [ Emerson ]
I do love violets: they tell the history of woman's love. [ L. E. Landon ]
Nature forces on our heart a Creator; history, a Providence. [ Jean Paul ]
The happiest women, like the happiest nations, have no history. [ George Eliot ]
Every deed in the history of the world begets another deed in turn. [ Arnold Schlönbach ]
The best benefit we derive from history is the enthusiasm which it excites. [ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ]
It's never happened in the World Series history - and it hasn't happened since. [ Yogi Berra ]
History should be to the political economist a wellspring of experience and wisdom. [ Gibbon ]
History tells us of illustrious villains, but there never was an illustrious miser. [ St. Evremond ]
When a man and woman are married, their romance ceases and their history commences. [ Rochebrune ]
Archaeology is not only the handmaid of history, it is also the conservator of art. [ Lord Lytton ]
Oppression is but another name for irresponsible power, if history is to be trusted. [ William Pinkney ]
I have often maintained that fiction may be much more instructive than real history. [ John Foster ]
Love is more pleasing than marriage, because romances are more amusing than history. [ Chamfort ]
The best thing which we derive from history is the enthusiasm which it raises in us. [ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ]
A tardiness in Nature, which often leaves the history unspoke, that it intends to do. [ William Shakespeare ]
The history of all the world tells us that immoral means will ever intercept good ends. [ Coleridge ]
Apothegms are, in history, the same as the pearls in the sand, or the gold in the mine. [ Erasmus ]
Wise men read very sharply all of your private history in your look and gait and behavior. [ Emerson ]
The history of love would be the history of humanity; it would be a beautiful book to write. [ Charles Nodier ]
Love, which is only an episode in the life of a man, is the entire history of a woman's life. [ Mme. de Staël ]
Passion is universal humanity. Without it religion, history, romance and art would be useless. [ Balzac ]
Love pleases more than marriage, for the reason that romance is more interesting than history. [ Chamfort ]
Some women's faces are, in their brightness, a prophecy; and some, in their sadness, a history. [ Dickens ]
Every library should try to be complete on something, if it were only the history of pin-heads. [ Holmes ]
It is vain to trust in wrong; as much of evil, so much of loss, is the formula of human history. [ Theodore Parker ]
I bet one legend that keeps recurring throughout history, in every culture, is the story of Popeye. [ Jack Handey, Deep Thoughts ]
What a volume could be written on the word mother
; what a history of forbearance, of kindness, and of love. [ James Ellis ]
Literary history is the great morgue where all seek the dead ones whom they love, and to whom they are related. [ Heine ]
The history of the thoughts of men, curious on account of their infinite variety, is also sometimes instructive. [ Fontanelle ]
The history of literature abounds with examples of words used almost without meaning by whole classes of writers. [ William Mathews ]
Upon all this history of man, mutability, apparently the most wayward and destructive, is written with a pen of iron. [ E. D. Mansfield ]
If eminent men whose history has been written could return to life, how they would laugh at what has been said of them. [ De Finod ]
The crudest foe is a masked benefactor. The wars which make history so dreary have served the cause of truth and virtue. [ Emerson ]
The history of persecution is a history of endeavor to cheat nature, to make water run up hill, to twist a rope of sand. [ Emerson ]
The heroes of literary history have been no less remarkable for what they have suffered than for what they have achieved. [ Johnson ]
Never trust a woman who wears mauve or a woman over thirty-five who is fond of pink ribbons. It means they have a history. [ Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Grey ]
Alphabets, if rightly understood, can be made to tell their own history, as well as the history of those who employed them. [ Prof. Sayce ]
Man is the highest product of his own history. The Discoverer finds nothing so tall as himself, nothing so valuable to him. [ Theodore Parker ]
Dramatical or representative play is, as it were, a visible history; for it sets out the image of things as if they were present. [ Bacon ]
There is in every human countenance either a history or a prophecy, which must sadden, or at least soften, every reflecting observer. [ Coleridge ]
The uniformity which history exhibits in the conduct of man in all ages and climes, is alone compatible with the system of necessity. [ Sir T. C. Morgan ]
In the history of man it has been very generally the case that when evils have grown insufferable they have touched the point of cure. [ Chapin ]
If we could read the secret history of our enemies we should find in each man's life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostility. [ Longfellow ]
Every school boy and school girl who has arrived at the age of reflection ought to know something about the history of the art of printing. [ Horace Mann ]
It is the vain endeavour to make ourselves what we are not that has strewn history with so many broken purposes and lives left in the rough. [ Lowell ]
Follies committed by sensible people, extravagances said by clever people, crimes committed by honest people: this is the history of revolutions. [ De Bonald ]
Fate follows and limits power; power attends and antagonises fate; we must respect fate as natural history, but there is more than natural history. [ Ralph Waldo Emerson ]
Last scene of all, that ends this strange, eventful history, is second childishness, and mere oblivion; sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything. [ William Shakespeare ]
The art of nations is to be accumulative, just as science and history are the work of living men not superseding, but building itself upon the work of the past. [ Ruskin ]
The history of woman is the history of the worst form of tyranny the world has ever known: the tyranny of the weak over the strong. It is the only tyranny that lasts. [ Oscar Wilde, A Woman of No Importance ]
Great Men are the inspired (speaking and acting) Texts of that Divine Book of Revelations, whereof a Chapter is completed from epoch to epoch, and by some named History. [ Carlyle ]
Those who are too idle to read, save for the purpose of amusement, may in these works acquire some acquaintance with history, which, however inaccurate, is better than none. [ Sir Walter Scott ]
I do not know in the whole history of the world a hero, a worthy man, a prophet, a true Christian, who has not been the victim of the jealous, of a scamp, or of a sinister spirit. [ Voltaire ]
History can be formed from permanent monuments and records; but lives can only be written from personal knowledge, which is growing every day less, and in a short time is lost forever. [ Dr. Johnson ]
Learn the lesson of your own pain - learn to seek God, not in any single event of past history, but in your own soul - in the constant verifications of experience, in the life of Christian love. [ Mrs. Humphry Ward ]
The truth of it is, there is nothing in history which is so improving to the reader as those accounts which we meet with of the death of eminent persons and of their behavior in that dreadful season. [ Addison ]
Rich as we are in biography, a well-written life is almost as rare as a well-spent one; and there are certainly many more men whose history deserves to be recorded than persons willing and able to record it. [ Carlyle ]
To see each other, to profess to love each other, to prove it, to quarrel, to hate, then to separate, that one may seek a new love: this is the history of a moment, and of every day in the comedy of the world. [ De Varennes ]
If the secret history of books could be written, and the author's private thoughts and meanings noted down alongside of his story, how many insipid volumes would become interesting, and dull tales excite the reader. [ Thackeray ]
There was, it is said, a criminal in Italy who was suffered to make his choice between Guicciardini and the galleys. He chose the history. But the war of Pisa was too much for him; he changed his mind, and went to the oars. [ Macaulay ]
Of all the species of literary composition, perhaps biography is the most delightful. The attention concentrated on one individual gives a unity to the materials of which it is composed, which is wanting in general history. [ Robert Hall ]
The name of a mother! what a long history does it bring with it of smiles and words of mildness, of tears shed by night and of sighings at the morning dawn, of love unrequited, of cares for which there can be no recompense on earth. [ Prof. Park ]
When at last the angels come to convey your departing spirit to Abraham's bosom, depend upon it, however dazzling in their newness they may be to you. you will find that your history is no novelty, and you yourself no stranger to them. [ James Hamilton ]
Error soon passes away, unless upheld by restraint on thought. History tells us (and the lesson is invaluable) that the physical force which has put down free inquiry has been the main bulwark of the superstitions and illusions of past ages. [ Channing ]
The Bible contains more true sublimity, more exquisite beauty, more pure morality, more important history, and finer strains of poetry and eloquence than can be collected from all other books, in whatever age or language they have been written. [ Sir William Jones ]
History is merely gossip. But scandal is gossip made tedious by morality. A man who moralizes is usually a hypocrite, and a woman who moralizes is invariably plain. There is nothing in the world as unbecoming to a woman as a Nonconformist conscience. [ Oscar Wilde, Lady Windemere's Fan ]
There are times in the history of men and nations, when they stand so near the vale that separates mortals from the immortals, time from eternity, and men from their God. that they can almost hear the beatings, and feel the pulsations of the heart of the Infinite. [ James A. Garfield ]
Great men, though far above us, are felt to be our brothers; and their elevation shows us what vast possibilities are wrapped up in our common humanity. They beckon us up the gleaming heights to whose summits they have climbed. Their deeds are the woof of this world's history. [ Moses Harvey ]
Of all studies, the most delightful and the most useful is biography. The seeds of great events lie near the surface; historians delve too deep for them. No history was ever true. Lives I have read which, if they were not, had the appearance, the interest, and the utility of truth. [ Landor ]
The physical plagues and the calamities of human nature have rendered society necessary. Society has added to the evils of nature; the imperfections of society have created the necessity for government, and government adds still further to the woes of society: this is the whole history of humanity. [ Chamfort ]
Writers of novels and romances in general bring a double loss on their readers, - they rob them both of their time and money; representing men, manners and things that never have been, nor are likely to be; either confounding or perverting history and truth, inflating the mind, or committing violence upon the understanding. [ Mary Wortley Montagu ]
Lord Bacon told Sir Edward Coke when he boasted, The less you speak of your greatness, the more I shall think of it.
Mirrors are the accompaniments of dandies, not heroes. The men of history were not perpetually looking in the glass to make sure of their own size. Absorbed in their work they did it, and did it so well that the wondering world saw them to be great, and labeled them accordingly. [ Rev. S. Coley ]
What a lesson, indeed, is all history and all life to the folly and fruitlessness of pride! The Egyptian kings had their embalmed bodies preserved in massive pyramids, to obtain an earthly immortality. In the seventeenth century they were sold as quack medicines, and now they are burnt for fuel! The Egyptian mummies, which Cambyses or time hath spared, avarice now consumeth. Mummy is become merchandise. [ Whipple ]
The world's history is a divine poem, of which the history of every nation is a canto, and every man a word. Its strains have been pealing along down the centuries; and, though there have been mingled the discords of warring cannon and dying men, yet to the Christian, philosopher, and historian, - the humble listener, - there has been a divine melody running through the song, which speaks of hope and halcyon days to come. [ James A. Garfield ]
The little I have seen of the world teaches me to look upon the errors of others in sorrow, not in anger. When I take the history of one poor heart that has sinned and suffered, and represent to myself the struggles and temptations it has passed through, the brief pulsations of joy, the feverish inquietude of hope and fear, the pressure of want, the desertion of friends. I would fain leave the erring soul of my fellowman with Him from whose hand it came. [ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow ]
Throughout the pages of history we are struck with the fact that our remarkable men possessed mothers of uncommon talents for good or bad, and great energy of character; it would almost seem from this circumstance, that the impress of the mother is more frequently stamped on the boy, and that of the father upon the girl - we mean the mental intellectual impress, in distinction from the physical ones. Mothers will do well to remember that their impress is often stamped upon their sons. [ Helen Mar ]
We cannot describe the natural history of the soul, but we know that it is divine. All things are known to the soul. It is not to be surprised by any communication. Nothing can be greater than it. Let those fear and those fawn who will. The soul is in her native realm; and it is wider than space, older than time, wide as hope, rich as love. Pusillanimity and fear she refuses with a beautiful scorn; they are not for her who putteth on her coronation robes, and goes out through universal love to universal power. [ Emerson ]
The Christian cemetery is a memorial and a record. It is not a mere field in which the dead are stowed away unknown; it is a touching and beautiful history, written in family burial plots, in mounded graves, in sculptured and inscribed monuments. It tells the story of the past, - not of its institutions, or its wars, or its ideas, but of its individual lives, - of its men and women and children, and of its household. It is silent, but eloquent; it is common, but it is unique. We find no such history elsewhere; there are no records in all the wide world in which we can discover so much that is suggestive, so much that is pathetic and impressive. [ Joseph Anderson ]
All things are engaged in writing their history. The planet, the pebble, goes attended by its shadow. The rolling rock leaves its scratches on the mountain; the river, its channel in the soil; the animal, its bones in the stratum; the fern and leaf, their modest epitaph in the coal. The falling drop makes its sculpture in the sand or the stone. Not a foot steps into the snow or along the ground, but prints, in characters more or less lasting, a map of its march. Every act of the man inscribes itself in the memories of its fellows, and in his own manners and face. The air is full of sounds, the sky of tokens, the ground is all memoranda and signatures, and every object covered over with hints which speak to the intelligent. [ Emerson ]