~History.~--The Grecian history is a poem, Latin history a picture, modern
history a chronicle.--_Chauteaubriand._
If men could learn from history, what lessons it might teach us! But
passion and party blind our eyes, and the light which experience gives
is a lantern on the stern, which shines only on the waves behind
us!--_Coleridge._
History, which is, indeed, little more than the register of the crimes,
follies, and misfortunes of mankind.--_Gibbon._
We must consider how very little history there is; I mean real,
authentic history. That certain kings reigned and certain battles were
fought we can depend upon as true; but all the coloring, all the
philosophy of history, is conjecture.--_Johnson._
History needs distance, perspective. Facts and events which are too well
attested cease, in some sort, to be malleable.--_Joubert._
To be entirely just in our estimate of other ages is not only
difficult,--it is impossible. Even what is passing in our presence we
see but through a glass darkly. The mind as well as the eye adds
something of its own before an image, even of the clearest object, can
be painted upon it; and in historical inquiries the most instructed
thinkers have but a limited advantage over the most illiterate. Those
who know the most approach least to agreement.--_Froude._
The impartiality of history is not that of the mirror which merely
reflects objects, but of the judge who sees, listens, and
decides.--_Lamartine._
In every human character and transaction there is a mixture of good and
evil: a little exaggeration, a little suppression, a judicious use of
epithets, a watchful and searching skepticism with respect to the
evidence on one side, a convenient credulity with respect to every
report or tradition on the other, may easily make a saint of Laud, or a
tyrant of Henry the Fourth.--_Macaulay._
History is but a kind of Newgate calendar, a register of the crimes and
miseries that man has inflicted on his fellow-man.--_Washington Irving._
History has its foreground and its background, and it is principally in
the management of its perspective that one artist differs from another.
Some events must be represented on a large scale, others diminished; the
great majority will be lost in the dimness of the horizon, and a general
idea of their joint effect will be given by a few slight
touches.--_Macaulay._
Violent natures make history. The instruments they use almost always
kill. Religion and philosophy have their vestments covered with innocent
blood.--_X. Doudan._
Each generation gathers together the imperishable children of the past,
and increases them by new sons of light, alike radiant with
immortality.--_Bancroft._
What history is not richer, does not contain far more, than they by whom
it is enacted, the present witnesses! What mortal understandeth his
way?--_Jacobi._
He alone reads history aright, who, observing how powerfully
circumstances influence the feelings and opinions of men, how often
vices pass into virtues, and paradoxes into axioms, learns to
distinguish what is accidental and transitory in human nature from what
is essential and immutable.--_Macaulay._
~Home.~--Home is the grandest of all institutions.--_Spurgeon._
The first sure symptom of a mind in health is rest of heart, and
pleasure felt at home.--_Young._
To most men their early home is no more than a memory of their early
years, and I'm not sure but they have the best of it. The image is never
marred. There's no disappointment in memory, and one's exaggerations are
always on the good side.--_George Eliot._