Quotes About Historical Insight

"Whoever wishes to foresee the future must consult the past; for human events ever resemble those of preceding times. This arises from the fact that they are produced by men who ever have been, and ever shall be, animated by the same passions, and thus they necessarily have the same results."
Machiavelli

"Mankind are so much the same, in all times and places, that history informs us of nothing new or strange in this particular. Its chief use is only to discover the constant and universal principles of human nature".
David Hume

"History would be an impossible area of human reflection if there were no recurrent attributes of human nature."
Willson H. Coates

"[History] distinguishes what is accidental and transitory in human nature from what is essential and immutable."
Macaulay

"History is for human self-knowledge…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."
R. G. Collingwood

"A man is a bundle of relations, a knot of roots, whose flower and fruitage is the world."
Ralph Waldo Emerson

"History, if thoroughly comprehended, furnishes something of the experience which a man would acquire who should be a contemporary of all ages and a fellow citizen of all peoples."
Joseph Roux

Introductory quotations

"Central" mysticism insights

"Other" spiritual wisdom

"Central" poetry insights

"Other" poetry wisdom

Spirituality & the wider world

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Quotes About History
Historical Insight