“There is properly no history; only biography.”

Other

1840s, Heroes and Hero-Worship (1840), The Hero as Divinity

Source: The Beautiful and Damned

Part 1, Chapter 23.
Books, Coningsby (1844), Contarini Fleming (1832)

Source: The Hero With a Thousand Faces

Part I: Lost Letters (p. 22)
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (1979)
Context: People are always shouting they want to create a better future. It's not true. The future is an apathetic void of no interest to anyone. The past is full of life, eager to irritate us, provoke and insult us, tempt us to destroy or repaint it. The only reason people want to be masters of the future is to change the past. They are fighting for access to the laboratories where photographs are retouched and biographies and histories rewritten.

Vol. 2, Ch. 19, § 233
Parerga and Paralipomena (1851), Counsels and Maxims

A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext03/7cncd10.txt (1849), Sunday
Context: To some extent, mythology is only the most ancient history and biography. So far from being false or fabulous in the common sense, it contains only enduring and essential truth, the I and you, the here and there, the now and then, being omitted. Either time or rare wisdom writes it. Before printing was discovered, a century was equal to a thousand years. The poet is he who can write some pure mythology to-day without the aid of posterity

Source: Seven Great Statesmen in the Warfare of Humanity with Unreason (1915), p. ix