Tao Te Ching
History
As is said, “history is written by the victors” and “the past is fiction;” but also, “If we don’t learn from history we’re bound to repeat it.” How much of what we know of as “history” is really “true?” When stories passed between friends get so quickly distorted, how can we take as “true” stories passed down to us from hundreds and thousands of years ago? What is myth and legend, what accurate reporting? Why do some stories and events become immortalized and others completely lost in obscurity? And most importantly, does it really matter? If the stories, events, and people of history are - like all words - mainly “fingers pointing at the moon,” symbols and lessons for us; what difference does the detailed accuracy make? And yet, as travelers on the path of our life experience; the wisdom, books, teachings, and quotations from the past become our shoes, bicycles, cars, trains, and planes taking us toward our true selves, awakened awareness, enlightenment.
Because of the many heroic, creative, and artistically, strategically, and wisdom-gifted historical figures; it’s tempting to nostalgically idealize the past and think in terms of bygone golden ages. We forget how far every historical sage, there were tens of thousands of sleep-walking, superstitious, materialistically-controlled contemporaries. This ratio may become the most useful gauge of progress and the evolution of consciousness. And by most statistical measurements, this ratio has continuously increased through the ages.
Quotes (106)
“Prosperity never stays long in the same place: cities once great are now small and ones great now were small.”
“The artistic representation of history is a more scientific and serious pursuit than the exact writing of history. For the art of letters goes to the heart of things, whereas the factual report merely collocates details.”
“It is the function of the historian to prolong the memory of goodness by preserving its record for all ages to see.”
“Some nations increase, others diminish, and in a short space the generations of living creatures change and like runners pass on the torch of life.”
“History has this and this only for its own: if a man will start upon it, he must sacrifice to no God but Truth; he must neglect all else; his sole rule and unerring guide is this – to think not of those who are listening to him now, but of the yet unborn who shall seek his converse.”
“You can use a brass mirror to adjust your hat; you can use history as a way to foresee the rise and fall of empires.”
“Don't only study the words and deeds of past sages but examine deeply the records of the rise and fall of dynasties, order and disorder, right and wrong, gain and loss.”
“Everything that occurs in the world, in every epoch, has something that corresponds to it in ancient times.”
“Whoever wishes to foresee the future must consult the past. Human events always resemble those of earlier times because human nature doesn't change, people are always animated by the same passions and so produce the same results.”
“History is in a manner a sacred thing... the rival of time, the depository of great actions, the witness of the past, example of the present, and monitor of the future.”
“History is a sacred kind of writing, because truth is essential to it, and where truth is, there God himself is, so far as truth is concerned.”
“Only the present has a right to exist because the past is only a memory and the future has no existence. ”
“History in general is a collection of crimes, follies, and misfortunes among which we have now and then met with a few virtues, and some happy times... The history of the great events of this world are scarcely more than the history of crimes.”
“What is history? The lie that everyone agrees on…”
“It is belied by all history and experience that the people are the origins of all just power.”
“Man has much more to fear from the passions of his fellow creatures than from the convulsions of the elements. [History is] indeed little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind.”
“What will happen after 100 generations in the future can be inferred from the gain and loss of the Three Dynasties.”
“May my son study history for it is the only true philosophy and the only true psychology.”
“the light which experience gives us is a lantern on the stern, which shines only on the waves behind us.”
“History is the national conscience of the human race... only by virtue of it does the human race come to be whole, come to be a humanity This is the true value of history.”
“Nothing in the world exists as a single block. Everything is a mosaic. The history of the past may be told in chronological sequence, but you cannot apply the same method to the moving present.”
“The more extensive a man's knowledge of what has been done, the greater will be his power of knowing what to do.”
“Attack and defense, want and war, victory and defeat, lordship and thraldom, all sealed with the seal of blood: this from henceforth is the History of Man.”
“The history of all previously existing societies is the history of class struggles.”
“All history has been a history of class struggles between dominated classes at various stages of social development.”
“A Historian has to fight against temptations special to his mode of life, temptations from Country, Class, Church, College, Party, Authority of talents, solicitation of friends.”
“The history of our race, and each individual’s experience, are sown thick with evidence that a truth is not hard to kill and that a lie told well is immortal.”
“By searching out origins, one becomes a crab. The historian looks backward; eventually he also believes backward”
“All that was great in the past was ridiculed, condemned, combated, suppressed — only to emerge all the more powerfully, all the more triumphantly from the struggle.”
“No one work can be detached from a life and studied separately. They are all fragments of one monument. The mistake that most historians make is to mutilate this genius by dividing it into different pieces.”
“'History repeats itself' and this saying has become a truism. Nevertheless, the study of the past is relegated to the scholar and the school boy—a testimony to human stupidity. We are like youth that can never learn from age. [History] is a really a chart for our guidance... where we now are going astray and losing ourselves, other men once did the same, and they left a record of the blind alleys they went down.”
“It is not the joy of the present moment but the wise reflections of the past that help us to preserve the future.”
“The past is terribly real and present, and it catches everyone who cannot save his skin with a satisfactory answer... It exerts a mighty suction which greedily draws everything living into itself; we can only escape from it—for awhile—by pressing forward.”
“Words ought to be a little wild, for they are the assault of thoughts on the unthinking…. Ideas shape the course of history.”
“history as man's rise from savagery to civilization—history as the record of the lasting contributions made to man's knowledge, wisdom, arts, morals, manners, skills—history as a laboratory rich in a hundred thousand experiments—history as our roots and our illumination, as the road by which we came and the only light that can clarify the present and guide us into the future... your face is your autobiography; you are what you are because of what you have been”
“I see men standing on the edge of knowledge, and holding the light a little farther ahead... history not as a dreary scene of politics and carnage, but as the struggle of man to understand, control, and remake himself and the world.”
“History would be worthless to us if it did not teach us to keep on our guard against the natural intolerance of an orthodoxy wielding power.”
“Civilization is polygenetic – as generations are moments in a family line, civilizations are units in a larger whole whose name is history.”
“Next to travel, the best education is history, which is travel extended into the past.”
“The historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence.”
“No single man makes history. History cannot be seen, just as one cannot see grass growing... It is the centuries of systematic explorations of the riddle of death, with a view of overcoming it.”
“History is the record of what human beings have been impelled to do by their ignorance and the enormous bumptiousness that makes them canonize their ignorance as a political or religious dogma”
“That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons of history.”
“The present is the past rolled up for action, and the past is the present unrolled for understanding.”
“Human history began with an act of disobedience, and it is not unlikely that it will be terminated by an act of obedience.”
“the most deplorable fact that Aristotle, by using this complicated and somewhat pretentious jargon, fascinated only too many philosophers... Aristotle, who was a historian of the more encyclopedic type, made no direct contribution to historicism”
“there can be no history of 'the past as it actually did happen;' there can only be historical interpretations and none of them final; every generation has a right to frame its own... Historicism is out to find The Path on which mankind is destined to walk; it is out to discover The Clue To History, or the Meaning of History.”
“historicism is a social and political and moral (or, shall I say, immoral) philosophy, and it has been as such most influential since the beginning of our civilization.”
“The good things in history are usually of very short duration, but afterward have a decisive influence on what happens over long periods of time.”
“Christianity strives to save history… In Christianity, the Sacred enters a human being to save humans, but it also enters history to ‘save’ history and turn otherwise ordinary, historical events into something capable of transmitting a trans-historical message.”
“Without culture, and the relative freedom it implies, society, even when perfect, is but a jungle. This is why any authentic creation is a gift to the future.”
“If there is anything to learn from history, it is that scoldings, warnings, and preachings are a complete ethical failure [and] only confirm and ingrain the attitudes which keep us at war.”
“If there is anything to be learned from history, it is that scoldings, warnings, and preachings are a complete ethical failure... they only confirm and ingrain the attitudes which keep us at war.”
“The idea that there is a universe that existed five minutes ago or that will exist in five minutes is just that: an idea in your head.”
“It is best to erase all personal history… How can I know who I am, when I am all this?”
“‘common sense’ is nothing more than the voices of thousands and thousands of ghosts from the past.”
“The untold story mothers the lie… the story has no beginning and no story has an end… the story is never true but the lie is indeed the child of silence.”
“Because the very nature of history is to make large distinctions, it encourages the intellect, therefore, to forgo finer ones... If such history continues to be the major informer of our sensibilities, we will remain functionally unintelligent.”
“We believe nothing if not that history is moving us toward some preordained paradise and that technology is the force behind that movement.”
“the past is most definitely past, and therefore not forever sealed but forever open to creative reinterpretation.”
“If nature is the realm of the unspeakable, history is the realm of the speakable... Since history is the drama of genius, its relentless surprise tempts us into designing boundaries for it... narrative invites us to rethink what we thought we knew.”
“If you ever start feeling nostalgic about ancient times, take your glasses off and imagine what it would be like without teeth.”
“The further back in time, the more narrow and limited our perceptions of the world. It slowly expanded from family to clan to village to city to country. With the revolution of information technology, it now includes all the world and all the people in it. Unfortunately our conceptions of equality and justice haven’t expanded as quickly as this awareness. People becoming true citizens of the world is evolution’s main challenge for us today.”
“Studying history is going on a journey and traveling into the past.”
“More than any other time in history, mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly.”
“All through history there's been these kind of divine losers that just take a deep breath and go ahead—knowing that society's not going to understand it—and not even caring, because they're having a good time.”
“The past is fiction, the future a dream. We are living on the edge of a razor.”
“In 20 years Genghis Khan conquered and ruled the largest empire in history [ ... ] far more people and territory then the Romans, Persians, Greeks, or Chinese had been able to do in centuries of sustained effort.”
“I fear that we live in an ahistorical age in which we believe that we are so wise that we no longer need the lessons of the past, perhaps most disturbingly of all that technology has put us beyond the lessons of the past.”
“There are plenty of things in history that are best left in the shadows. Accurate knowledge does not improve people’s lives… The objective does not necessarily surpass the subjective, you know. Reality does not necessarily extinguish fantasy…”
“History is not so much a matter of what is remembered or repeated as of the things we prefer to leave unsaid.”
“Stories are an essential part of who we are. They can tell us more about ourselves and our world that anything else can.”
“If something did go terribly wrong in human history – and given the current stat of the world, it's hard to deny something did – then perhaps it began to go wrong precisely when people started losing that freedom to imagine and enact other forms of social existence”
“There are still many causes worth sacrificing for, so much history yet to be made.”
“History is not, after all, what really happened (no one can know; it’s gone), but only what we believe happened.”
“History was made by very few people while everyone else plowed fields and carried water buckets.”
“This is the best reason to learn history: not in order to predict the future, but to free yourself of the past and imagine alternative destinies. Of course this is not total freedom – we cannot avoid being shaped by the past. But some freedom is better than none.”
“History, it turns out, is not written by the victims, it is written by the storytellers... Even the defeated get to tell their story—and in it, they are the heroes.”
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