Top 100 History Literature Quotes
#1. Good writing is almost the concomitant of good history. Literature and history were joined long since by the powers which shaped the human brain; we cannot put them asunder.
C.V. Wedgwood
#2. True education does not consist merely in the acquiring of a few facts of science, history, literature, or art, but in the development of character.
David O. McKay
#3. Gender consciousness has become involved in almost every intellectual field: history, literature, science, anthropology. There's been an extraordinary advance.
Clifford Geertz
#4. But having a really good understanding of history, literature, psychology, sciences - is very, very important to actually being able to make movies.
George Lucas
#5. I would say if you are familiar with our history and the history of our art and literature that you see a clear cut pattern of people wanting to contribute, not only artistically, but in some practical purpose, for the benefits of the community.
Gil Scott-Heron
#6. Serious affairs and history are carefully laid snares for the uninformed.
Dejan Stojanovic
#7. It is doubtless one of Aristotle's great services that he conceived so clearly the truth that literature is a thing that grows and has a history.
Gilbert Murray
#8. Literary history is the great morgue where all seek the dead ones whom they love, or to whom they are related.
Heinrich Heine
#9. To those of you who study history, economics, sociology, literature and language I present the challenge of the utilization of the enormous resources in our grasp to the problem of creating a genuinely good life for yourselves and your children.
Polykarp Kusch
#10. I think respectful conflict is intrinsic to the spirit of literature. It reminds us that literary history is living and evolving and thrives on us being active participants.
Matthew Pearl
#11. The traditional Sanskrit learning has given to Brahaman community of Kashmir, small as it has been always, a distinguished place in the history of Sanskrit literature since early times.
Aurel Stein
#12. The great work of Gibbon is indispensable to the student of history. The literature of Europe offers no substitute for "The
Edward Gibbon
#13. The writers who reject tendentiousness and purpose in their work are the very ones who display it in every word they write. I could draw countless examples from the history of literature to show that the more a writer clamours for spiritual freedom, the more tendentious his work is liable to be.
Bjornstjerne Bjornson
#14. It is a law woven into the nature of man, attested by history, by science, by literature and art, and by dally experience, that strength of mind and force of character are the supreme rulers of human affairs.
Lucius Quintus Cincinnatus Lamar II
#16. When you realize that your history books and your science books and your literature books are not the result of experts sitting down and making it a wise decision, but of political pressure groups coming to the state textbook hearings, this is wrong.
Diane Ravitch
#17. Ours was a family in which everybody was constantly reading, and where literature, politics, history, and the events of the prize ring were discussed at breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
Louis L'Amour
#19. Cut quarrels out of literature, and you will have very little history or drama or fiction or epic poetry left.
Robert Staughton Lynd
#20. Instead of being a page-turner, 'Moby-Dick' is a repository of American history and culture and the essentials of Western literature. The book is so encyclopedic that space aliens could use it to re-create the whale fishery as it once existed on the planet Earth in the midst of the 19th century.
Nathaniel Philbrick
#21. I don't think enough journalists read enough - literature, history. You've got to keep reading all through your career.
Pete Hamill
#22. History is a branch of mathematics. So is literature. Economics is a branch of religion.
Matt Haig
#23. From our human experience and history, at least as far as I am informed, I know that everything essential and great has only emerged when human beings had a home and were rooted in a tradition. Today's literature is, for instance, largely destructive.
Martin Heidegger
#24. I often think that eventually I'd love to do some papers ... my correspondence if life calms down a bit, but I think I'd do history or English literature ... I've had enough of journos.
Brooke Fraser
#25. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled.
Barbara Tuchman
#26. For my part, I love to give myself up to the illusion of poetry. A hero of fiction that never existed is just as valuable to me as a hero of history that existed a thousand years ago.
Washington Irving
#27. Dickens' London was a place of the mind, but it was also a real place. Much of what we take today to be the marvellous imaginings of a visionary novelist turn out on inspection to be the reportage of a great observer.
Judith Flanders
#28. School was rough for me. I was a good student in middle school, but high school wasn't so fun. I still pulled through, though! I excelled in art, fashion, history and English literature - anything creative. Math and science I struggled a bit more in.
India De Beaufort
#29. The history of imitation of the older literature, particularly abroad, has among other advantages this one, that the important concepts of unintentional parody and passive wit can be deduced from it most easily and comprehensively.
Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
#30. George Stigler Nobel laureate and a leader of Chicago School was asked why there were no Nobel Prizes awarded in the other social sciences, sociology, psychology, history, etc. "Don't worry", Stigler said, "they have already have a Nobel Prize in ... Literature"
Robert Kuttner
#31. I lead no party; I follow no leader. I have given the best part of my life to careful study of Islam, its law and polity, its culture, its history and its literature.
Muhammad Iqbal
#33. Liberty is terrifying but it is also exhilarating.
Germaine Greer
#35. Kim Newman's Anno Dracula is back in print, and we must celebrate. It was the first mash-up of literature, history and vampires, and now, in a world in which vampires are everywhere, it's still the best, and its bite is just as sharp. Compulsory reading, commentary, and mindgame: glorious.
Neil Gaiman
#36. Experience, derived from scientific investigation, led to all the scientific literature in history. Likewise, experience, derived from religious transcendence, led to all the religious scriptures in history. It's never the other way around.
Abhijit Naskar
#37. I thought those were others. Soon, I was to learn that they were us.
Ralph Webster
#38. The methodologies of examining hip hop are borrowed from sociology, politics, religion, economics, urban studies, journalism, communications theory, American studies, transatlantic studies, black studies, history, musicology, comparative literature, English, linguistics, and other disciplines.
Michael Eric Dyson
#40. Any experience, which is not written, will be lost in time. Rich literature is lost forever.
Lailah Gifty Akita
#41. There's no shortage of female role models. They're everywhere - in history, in literature, in the news. Just look around.
Keri Russell
#42. In your opinion, where do private and political life, personal history and History meet? You know the answer, Maya. You say it unhesitatingly - in art and literature.
Abdourahman A. Waberi
#44. As I think about anyone or anything
whether history or literature or my father or political organizations or a poem or a film
as I seek to evaluate the potentiality, the life-supportive commitment and possibilities of anyone or any thing, the decisive question is always where is the love?
June Jordan
#45. We are all bits and pieces of history and literature and international law, Byron, Tom Paine, Machiavelli or Christ, it's here. And the hour's late. And the war's begun. And we are out here, and the city is there, all wrapped up in its own coat of a thousand colors.
Ray Bradbury
#46. In schoolbooks and in literature we can separate ecclesiastical and political history; in the life of mankind they are intertwined.
Leopold Von Ranke
#47. Actor training should be broadly humanistic, involving the study not just of dramatic literature and theatre history, but of languages, literature, and history generally, and should be centered on acting in plays rather than just exercises, improvisations, monologues, or even scenes.
Richard Hornby
#48. The history of fiction is about family - an inexhaustible subject for literature. We are creatures driven by emotions that are on high display in intimate relations - inside the family.
Siri Hustvedt
#49. Behind every door in London there are stories, behind every one ghosts. The greatest writers in the history of the written word have given them substance, given them life.
And so we readers walk, and dream, and imagine, in the city where imagination found its great home.
Anna Quindlen
#50. Despite centuries of English literature, the most famous split infinitive in all of history comes from Star Trek.
R. Curtis Venture
#51. In every genre of biblical literature and every stage of biblical history, God is seen pouring out his grace on his people for the sake of his glory among all peoples.
David Platt
#52. There's a history of English literature where the best boils to the top, and Jane Austen stands right at the top of that.
JJ Feild
#53. I think literature reveals more about us than history does.
Susan Meissner
#54. Woe be to him who tries to isolate one department of knowledge from the rest. All science is one: language, literature and history, physics, mathematics and philosophy; subjects which seem the most remote from one another are in reality connected, or rather they all form a single system.
Jules Michelet
#55. I love to read about anger. A "feel bad" book always makes me feel good. And no other novel in the history of literature is more depressing than Christina Stead's The Man Who Loved Children.
John Waters
#56. The aim of science is to discover and illuminate truth. And that, I take it, is the aim of literature, whether biography or history ... It seems to me, then, that there can be no separate literature of science.
Rachel Carson
#57. But the thing about Literature is, well, basically it encapsulates all the disciplines - it's history, philosophy, politics, sexual politics, sociology, psychology, linguistics, science. Literature is mankind's organised response to the world around him, or her.
David Nicholls
#58. The idiot willingness to choose sides is what feeds the abattoir of history.
Steven Heighton
#59. By the time Florence Nightingale got her neurotic hands on Cleopatra, she had been mangled beyond recognition by both history and literature.
Stacy Schiff
#60. Literature has always been a part of my life. I studied history and literature in college. My mother is a novelist; I grew up around books.
Elliot Ackerman
#61. A fortress built long ago,
Walls made timeless by historic glory.
The small girl in the boat slows,
To listen to its story.
Rachel Lewis
#62. I write to breath life back into memory to remind African-Americans of our rich and textured history. I also see myself as a "root," and for me the "fierce winds" include the marginalization-the downright segregation-of literature written by people of color.
Bernice L. McFadden
#63. Psychologists cannot fix the world so they fix women.
Germaine Greer
#64. I didn't choose Russia but Russia chose me. I had been fascinated from an early age by the culture, the language, the literature and the history to the place.
Helen Dunmore
#65. A lawyer without history or literature is a mechanic, a mere working mason; if he possesses some knowledge of these, he may venture to call himself an architect.
Walter Scott
#66. Ever since childhood, I've been interested in history and myth. Not just the facts and figures of the past, but everything that contributes to shape our perception of an age: architecture, art, literature and so forth.
Anne Fortier
#67. A history of literature, unlike history as such, ought to list only victories, for its defeats are no victory for anyone.
Julien Gracq
#68. At no other time or place in human history have social conflicts been so richly diverse, so vigorously articulated, so eloquently manifest in art and literature or adressed with such directness by the political system and the media.
Ramachandra Guha
#69. Barack Obama is an elegant and literate man with a cosmopolitan sense of the world. He is widely read in philosophy, literature, and history - as befits a former law professor - and he has shown time and again a surprising interest in contemporary fiction.
Teju Cole
#70. When we create, we become stronger. When we create, we feel better. When we create, we can use our own two hands to create a new world. And this new world will be as we want it to be.
Valentina Knurova
#71. In the theatre we reach out and touch the past through literature, history and memory so that we might receive and relive significant and relevant human qualities in the present and then pass them on to future generations.
Anne Bogart
#72. Well, they may not be civilized, but they certainly are confident - and this confidence is one of the open-handed pleasures of early Irish literature.
Thomas Cahill
#73. Fiction is the enemy of history. Fiction makes us believe in structure, in beginnings and middles and endings, in tragedy and comedy. There is neither tragedy nor comedy in war, only disorder and harm.
Sarah Moss
#74. As a filmmaker coming from one of the youngest lands in the world, New Zealand - safe, green and democratic - I was intrigued by Afghanistan, with its literature and poetry, its old land and its deep history.
Pietra Brettkelly
#75. History belongs to the victors, legends to the people, fantasy to literature. Only death is certain.
Peter Esterhazy
#76. If I have nothing but a room full of books, it is enough for me to survive life.
Lailah Gifty Akita
#77. I am trying to make clear through my writing something which I believe: that biography- history in general- can be literature in the deepest and highest sense of that term.
Robert Caro
#78. The study of history and philosophy, accompanied by some acquaintance with art and literature, should be for lawyers and engineers as well as for those who study in arts faculties.
Terry Eagleton
#79. Too many writers are trying to write with too shallow an education. Whether they go to college or not is immaterial ... a good writer needs a sense of the history of literature to be successful as a writer.
James Kisner
#80. But ignorance of divine revelation affects all of thought and life, from one's view toward history and philosophy, to one's interpretation of music and literature, to one's understanding of mathematics and physics.
Vincent Cheung
#81. But perhaps the greatest escapism of all is to take refuge in the domesticity of the past, the home that history and literature become, avoiding the one moment of time in which we are not at home, yet have to live: the present.
Tim Parks
#82. An honest bookstore would post the following sign above its 'self-help' section: 'For true self-help, please visit our philosophy, literature, history and science sections, find yourself a good book, read it, and think about it.
Roger Ebert
#84. When I arrived at Columbia, I gave up acting and became interested in all things French. French poetry, French history, French literature.
Joseph Gordon-Levitt
#85. Literature is the expression of a feeling of deprivation, a recourse against a sense of something missing. But the contrary is also true: language is what makes us human. It is a recourse against the meaningless noise and silence of nature and history.
Octavio Paz
#86. We honor the Greeks because in their art, literature, philosophy and civic history we discern the early stirrings of our own ideals - rationalism, humanism, democracy - which first took firm root in Athenian soil.
Caroline Alexander
#87. Had I not gone to Japan in 1986, had I stayed home and majored in English literature as I'd intended to do, I might indeed have become an investment banker, an outcome that perhaps would have proved a more severe blow to the health of the U.S. economy than to the history of the novel.
John Burnham Schwartz
#88. Rabbinic literature, though it includes plenty of material from before AD 135, tends to see everything in the light, not of a continuing story about God and Israel within the ongoing flow of world history, but of the much thinner, often dehistoricized world of Torah-piety.
N. T. Wright
#89. I arrived from Harvard, where I had studied philosophy and the history of ideas, with a bias toward literature and formal thought.
Robert Darnton
#91. And I found there were myriad definitions of this thing called tragedy that had wormed its way through the history of literature; and the simplest of all was this: that it is the story of a figure who, through some moral flaw or personal failing, falls through force of circumstance to his doom.
Helen Macdonald
#92. I learned more about history and literature in the used bookstores in DC than in college libraries.
Douglas Brinkley
#94. Vain, silly creature. Made for loving? Yes, but she'll have no lover, for I don't want her and she'll see no other.
Jean Rhys
#95. Creators of history always play with our impotence and our ignorance.
Dejan Stojanovic
#96. Sadly, we have confused biblical literature with history, and turned prophecy into biography.
Eli Of Kittim
#97. The idea that a student can write a sonnet or a novel without having a sound understanding about its history, and where it fits into literature as a whole, seems to me to be manifestly daft.
Nicholas Royle
#98. The history of interpretation, the skills by which we keep alive in our minds the light and dark of past literature and past humanity ... is to an incalculable extent a history of error.
Frank Kermode
#99. I am fascinated that no one I have read seems to have noticed that the literature on Picasso continually turns grown-up women into girls.
Siri Hustvedt
