
“History is the essence of innumerable biographies.”
On History.
1820s, Critical and Miscellaneous Essays (1827–1855)
Other
“History is the essence of innumerable biographies.”
On History.
1820s, Critical and Miscellaneous Essays (1827–1855)
“There is properly no history; only biography.”
1840s, Essays: First Series (1841), History
“The history of the world is but the biography of great men.”
1840s, Heroes and Hero-Worship (1840), The Hero as Divinity
“Read no history: nothing but biography, for that is life without theory.”
Part 1, Chapter 23.
Books, Coningsby (1844), Contarini Fleming (1832)
“Wherever the poetry of myth is interpreted as biography, history, or science, it is killed.”
Source: The Hero With a Thousand Faces
“Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe…”
Source: The Outline of History (1920), Ch. 41
Context: Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe... Yet, clumsily or smoothly, the world, it seems, progresses and will progress.
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.