“Unless he is an annalist or a chronicler, the historian communicates a pattern which was invisible to his subjects when they lived it, and unknown to his contemporaries before he detected it.”
Source: The Shape of Time, 1982, p. 13
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George Kubler 15
American art historian 1912–1996Related quotes

“No one writes anything worth writing, unless he writes entirely for the sake of his subject.”
Source: The Art of Literature

Source: Cannibals All!, or Slaves Without Masters (1857), pp. 44-45

“He that is proud eats up himself: pride is his own glass, his own trumpet, his own chronicle.”

John Speirs, in Boris Ford (ed.) Medieval Literature: Chaucer and the Alliterative Tradition (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982) p. 85.
Criticism

“Every man at the bottom of his heart believes that he is a born detective.”
Source: The Power-House (1916), Ch. 2 "I First Hear Of Mr Andrew Lumley"

Source: Liberalism (1911), Chapter V, Gladstone And Mill, p. 56 .

Preface (Scribner edition, 1872) <!-- New York, Scribner p xx -->
Chips from a German Workshop (1866)
Context: He must be a man of little faith, who would fear to subject his own religion to the same critical tests to which the historian subjects all other religions. We need not surely crave a tender or merciful treatment for that faith which we hold to be the only true one. We should rather challenge it for the severest tests and trials, as the sailor would for the good ship to which he trusts his own life, and the lives of those who are dear to him. In the Science of Religion, we can decline no comparisons, nor claim any immunities for Christianity, as little as the missionary can, when wrestling with the subtle Brahmin, or the fanatical Mussulman, or the plain speaking Zulu.

"Statement of Belief," Bookman, Sept 1928