Top 86 Meaning Of History Quotes
#1. Show me one thing here on earth which has begun well and not ended badly. The proudest palpitations are engulfed in a sewer, where they cease throbbing, as though having reached their natural term: this downfall constitutes the heart's drama and the negative meaning of history.
Emile M. Cioran
#3. The business of the missionary, and the business of the Christian Church in any situation, is to challenge the plausibility structure in the light of God's revelation of the real meaning of history.
Lesslie Newbigin
#4. I turn my negatives into my positives because one of my mottos is, 'Yesterday's history, tomorrow's a mystery,' meaning that you can't go back and change anything in the past.
Vanilla Ice
#5. History is not just about the analysis of evidence, unrolling vellum documents or answering exam papers. It is not about judging the dead. It is about understanding the meaning of the past - to realize the whole evolving human story over centuries, not just our own lifetimes.
Ian Mortimer
#6. Every frame of a Coen brothers movie is filled with history and meaning, and the deeper you go, the deeper you get. That's why their movies stand up particularly well to repeated viewing and investigation.
Oscar Isaac
#7. The very concept of history implies the scholar and the reader. Without a generation of civilized people to study history, to preserve its records, to absorb its lessons and relate them to its own problems, history, too, would lose its meaning.
George F. Kennan
#8. We have history. That has weight. It has meaning. And you of all people know that just because something is in the past doesn't mean it's dead and buried.
Melanie Harlow
#9. It is impossible to write history without some vision of its meaning from which judgments of significance can be made. And if there is no meaning, why be a historian? The
Lesslie Newbigin
#11. The original home of the Aryan race appears to have been somewhere among the mountains and lofty table-lands of Central Asia. The word 'Arya,' meaning the high or the excellent, indicates their superiority over the neighboring races long before the beginning of history.
Bayard Taylor
#12. A babble of words that no one understands now fills the airwaves, and language loses all meaning as we sink slowly, mindlessly, into herstory rather than history because most rapists are men, aren't they?
Gore Vidal
#13. The history of Israel and Judaism is the unfolding of the meaning of this story. It's retelling is never finished and will not be until the Kingdom.
Timothy Radcliffe
#15. The history of modern philosophy is the history of losing and regaining the awareness of the fact that there is no third way between the Absolute and the absurd.
Jakub Bozydar Wisniewski
#16. when faced with a clash of constitutional principle and a line of unreasoned cases wholly divorced from the text, history, and structure of our founding document, we should not hesitate to resolve the tension in favor of the Constitution's original meaning.
Ralph A. Rossum
#17. Every single human soul has more meaning and value than the whole of history.
Nikolai A. Berdyaev
#18. We are never completely contemporaneous with our present. History advances in disguise; it appears on stage wearing a mask of the preceding scene, and we tend to lose the meaning of the play.
Regis Debray
#19. The traditional religions worry me. Their long history proves that they have not understood the meaning of the commandment: Thou shalt not kill. If we want to save this world from unimaginable destruction we should concentrate not on the faraway God , but on the heart of the individual.
Albert Einstein
#20. The thing itself is never just out there in the world waiting to be framed by the photographer's Leica; rather, it is something dynamically produced in the act of representation and reception and already subject to the grids of meaning imposed on it by culture, history, language, and so forth.
Abigail Solomon-Godeau
#21. It was not the brutality of what occurred next that changed my mind and brought home to me the full meaning of fear. It was the brilliance of it.
Elizabeth Kostova
#22. If you will protest courageously, and yet with dignity and Christian love, when the history books are written in future generations, the historians will have to pause and say, There lived a great people-a black people-who injected new meaning and dignity into the veins of civilization.
Martin Luther King Jr.
#23. I was reminded of our history lessons, in which we learned about the loot or bounty an army enjoys when a battle is won. I began to see the awards and recognition just like that. They were little jewels without much meaning. I needed to concentrate on winning the war.
Malala Yousafzai
#24. Words have meaning, not life or persons or the universe itself," he said. "Our search for certainty rests in our attempts at understanding the history of all individual selves and all civilizations. Beyond that, there is only awe." From a Life Magazine interview in 1988.
Julian Jaynes
#25. There are those who regard this history of past strife and exile as better forgotten. But, to use the phrase of Yeats, let us not casually reduce "that great past to a trouble of fools." For we need not feel the bitterness of the past to discover its meaning for the present and the future.
John F. Kennedy
#26. I wish to make it clear that 'history' in the sense in which most people speak of it simply does not exist; and this is at least one reason why I say that it has no meaning.
Karl R. Popper
#27. Normal is enormously susceptible to swinging with the gusts of politics and history. Disguised as scientific and fixed, it is subjective and protean. That is why I used the word normative above, a term derived from statistics, simply meaning what most people do.
Adam Levine
#28. If I had my way, the trip's every moment would be a Moment - ripe with meaning, worthy of at least a sidebar or infographic in my personal history book. I looked back to the road, followed the pavement
Brian Benson
#29. Throughout history we humans have struggled to find meaning in the awesome contradiction of our human condition. Neither philosophy, nor psychology nor biology has, until now, been able to provide the truthful explanation.
Jeremy Griffith
#30. And it is a great fact of history that the most mediocre and well-meaning imbeciles can strike down the mighty with surprising effectiveness when there is such a huge disparity of souls.
Anne Rice
#31. Narration, after all, isn't just a literary function. It represents the human capacity to tell stories in such a manner that they yield meaning. Television replaced this concerted quest for meaning with a frantic pursuit of wonder.
Steve Almond
#32. I talk about Africa and its meaning, being the birthplace of man and all that great history that's been erased and even hidden. I think it's my duty to be proud and to bring about the conversation that allows us to talk about the great history of my people.
Nas
#33. In my family, we seem to have a tortured history of not saying what we ought to and not meaning what we do.
Jodi Picoult
#34. Later on in life, you expect a bit of rest, don't you? You think you deserve it. I did, anyway. But then you begin to understand that the reward of merit is not life's business.
Julian Barnes
#35. Sorry has got to be the most over-used cliched get-out clause in the history of mankind. Tossed out flippantly without any real meaning or substance.
Siobhan Davis
#36. I'd known for a long time why I loved history. It was because the historians made it sound so coherent, so purposeful, so complete. They'd take an entire century and impose a meaning on it, a personality, a destiny - and this was, of course, a lie.
Anne Rice
#37. Purpose declares that the trajectory of my existence and the course of human history were intentionally set to collide at this precise moment in time because what I have to offer human history is desperately needed at this precise time.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
#38. The words of the Constitution ... are so unrestricted by their intrinsic meaning or by their history or by tradition or by prior decisions that they leave the individual Justice free, if indeed they do not compel him, to gather meaning not from reading the Constitution but from reading life.
Felix Frankfurter
#39. It started out as a typically insane idea to map every part of the published text in terms of its manuscript provenance and history, and to establish the cultural meaning of the book, part and whole.
Oliver Harris
#40. Those that can be troubled to muse upon the meaning of life are general disappointed when they figure it out.
Jasper Fforde
#41. If journalism is the first draft of history, then talk radio provides an early glimpse into how the meaning of political events will be spun for ideological and partisan purposes.
Jackson Katz
#42. The aim here is not to separate fact from fantasy but to show how each embodies a distinct class of knowledge and how one is deeply implicated in the other.
Constance Penley
#43. Those who read the Scriptures as magnificent literature, breath-taking poetry, or history and overlook the story of salvation miss the Bible's real meaning and message.
Billy Graham
#44. All history is an attempt to find pattern and meaning in a section of human experience, and every historian worthy of the name raises questions about man's ultimate destiny and the meaning of all history to which, as history, he can provide no answers. The answers belong to the realm of theology.
G. B. Caird
#45. Words enable us to transfer our thoughts from inside our own mind into the mind of another. They have the power to alter history, to describe the past, and to bring meaning and substance to the present.
Jim Rohn
#46. I believe that history might be, and ought to be, taught in a new fashion so as to make the meaning of it as a process of evolution intelligible to the young.
Thomas Huxley
#47. I have a dream, and a plan, to combine the commercial possibilities of Valentine's Day with the substance and meaning of black history month. I call it: Blackentine's Day.
Mo Rocca
#48. I was drawn to biology and history and, of course, art. And I loved languages. The biggest problem I had is that I wasn't taught about the connections between all these things. I think that would have given life a lot more meaning and it would be a lot more enjoyable.
Hussein Chalayan
#49. Destiny is something not be to desired and not to be avoided. a mystery not contrary to reason, for it implies that the world, and the course of human history, have meaning.
Dag Hammarskjold
#50. the word that the Buddha used for suffering, dukkha, actually has the more subtle meaning of "pervasive unsatisfactoriness," I was even more impressed. "Suffering" always sounded a bit melodramatic, even if a careful reading of history seemed to support it. "Pervasive unsatisfactoriness
Mark Epstein
#51. It is indeed the truth of the traumatic experience that forms the center of its psychopathology; it is not a pathology of falsehood or displacement of meaning, but of history itself (p. 5)
Cathy Caruth
#52. I came to see that man finds meaning in his existence only through the active demonstration of his human self, a cosmos comprising the entire constellation of life's factors: culture, civilization, tradition, history, ideals, facts, physical conditions, one's mental state, the ecology, and so on.
Pramoedya Ananta Toer
#53. It isn't that you subordinate your ideas to the force of the facts in autobiography but that you construct a sequence of stories to bind up the facts with a persuasive hypothesis that unravels your history's meaning.
Philip Roth
#54. I defend the authority of women and explore its meaning for them rather than assume they need to be more accommodating or sensitive.
David Bedrick
#55. After his failed political career, Lincoln often pondered the question of the purpose of the meaning of life. In 1850 [ten years before he was elected President], Lincoln told Herdon [his law partner] How hard, oh how hard it is to die and leave one's country no better than if one had never lived.
Ronald C. White Jr.
#57. The life of every citizen is becoming a business. This, it seems to me, is one of the worst interpretations of the meaning of human life history has ever seen. Man's life is not a business.
Saul Bellow
#58. Do you understand the meaning of the soil beneath your feet?
P.J. Parker
#59. Philosophers have argued without a trend toward order; time would lack meaning. The future would be indistinguishable from the past. Sequences of events would be just so many random scenes from a thousand novels. History would be indistinct, like the mist slowly gathered by treetops in evening.
Alan Lightman
#60. You had to be aware that I saw that photography was a mere episode in the history of the optical projection and when the chemicals ended, meaning the picture was fixed by chemicals, we were in a new era.
David Hockney
#61. The Trail of Tears has a great deal of meaning for every person of American Indian ancestry, whether they are Cherokee or not. For me, it has always stood for what is best and worst about the history of the United States.
Joseph Bruchac
#62. It is a scholar's task to find patterns in nature or cycles in history. Initially, it's no different from finding portraits of animals and heroes in the stars. The question is, Have you discovered a preexisting truth? Or have you imposed an arbitrary meaning on whatever it is you're considering?
Mary Doria Russell
#63. A change was coming over the world, the meaning and direction of which even still is hidden from us, a change from era to era. - Froude's History of England, ch. i.
William Hurrell Mallock
#64. Like psychoanalysis, constitutional jurisprudence has become a game without rules. By defying the plain meaning of words, ignoring context and history, and using a little ingenuity, you can make the Constitution mean anything you like.
Joseph Sobran
#65. Victory may now require a level of force deemed objectionable by civilized peoples, meaning that some, for justifiable reasons, may be reluctant to pursue it. But victory has not become an ossified concept altogether.
Victor Davis Hanson
#66. Most of the words we use in history and everyday speech are like mental depth charges. As they descend [through our consciousness] and detonate, their resonant power is unleashed, showering our understanding with fragments of accumulated meaning and association.
James Axtell
#67. My hope is that I may bear witness to the fact that there is a great mystery calling to us all, beckoning across the landscape of our history, promising to realize itself and to give real meaning to what is otherwise only the confusion of our lives and our collective past.
Terence McKenna
#68. These dilemmas present perhaps the most enduring conundrum of human history: can people derive their identity primarily by positive association or does life's meaning also require negative comparison to others?
William J. Clinton
#69. So it was like that now, catastrophe inevitable at the most empty moments. Everyone waiting, almost wanting it, a secret, guilty desire for meaning. Their time in history made significant for once by that distant wall of black cloud.
Maggie Helwig
#70. The computer on the desk of the student in school knows no history. It is not like a book, worn at the edges by human hands. No little child has written a note in it, long ago. It will not be passed down to the children of the children who use it. Its "meaning" is that there is no enduring meaning.
Anthony M. Esolen
#71. In its amplest meaning History includes every trace and vestige of everything that man has done or thought since first he appeared on the earth.
James Harvey Robinson
#72. The development of the meaning attaching to the personal self, the conscious being, is the subject matter of the history of psychology.
James Mark Baldwin
#73. Silence can be a plan
rigorously executed
the blueprint to a life
It is a presence
it has a history a form
Do not confuse it
with any kind of absence
Adrienne Rich
#74. Apocalypse is the lens through which we view international politics because it is the fons et origo of the concept of history and historiography. Were it not for apocalypse, we would not have the categories of mind with which to ask the questions of meaning and adequacy of interpretation. M
Robert Hamerton-Kelly
#75. I thought it necessary to study history, even to study it deeply, in order to obtain a clear meaning of our immediate time.
Paul Valery
#76. I shall always be grateful for this curious love of history, allowing me to spend a lifetime looking back into the past, allowing me to learn from these large figures about the struggle for meaning for life.
Doris Kearns Goodwin
#77. Love is our most unifying and empowering common spiritual denominator. The more we ignore its potential to bring greater balance and deeper meaning to human existence, the more likely we are to continue to define history as one long inglorious record of man's inhumanity to man.
Aberjhani
#78. That's how history unfolds. People weave a web of meaning, believe in it with all their heart, but sooner or later the web unravels, and when we look back we cannot understand how anybody could have taken it seriously. (p.175)
Yuval Noah Harari
#79. But I see history as a book with many pages
and each day we fill a page with acts of hopefulness and meaning.
George H. W. Bush
#80. History can show you that it was one pile of bad stuff after another. It can also show you that there's been tremendous progress in knowledge, behaviour, laws, civilisation. It cannot show you that there was a meaning behind it.
Tony Judt
#81. Political and social history are in my view two aspects of the same process. Social life loses half its interest and political movements lose most of their meaning if they are considered separately.
F. M. Powicke
#82. The causes of life's history [cannot] resolve the riddle of life's meaning.
Stephen Jay Gould
#83. Every muscular rigidity contains the history and the meaning of its origin.
Wilhelm Reich
#84. Unfortunately, evil will never be wholly defeated.Mankind is faced with a continual struggle against evil. We believe that this is where the meaning of our lives and of human history lies.
Alija Izetbegovic
#85. The truth is in Jesus and it leads to the fullness of truth about God, man, creation, history, sin, righteousness, grace, faith, salvation, life, death, purpose, meaning, relationships, heaven, hell, judgement, eternity, and everything else of ultimate consequence.
John F. MacArthur Jr.
#86. Examination of its own history and of the forms of thought given the name "philosophy" indicates that "philosophy" has itself borne many fundamentally different meanings through the years, and from one school or movement to another.
Gregory B. Sadler
