“History is the essence of innumerable biographies.”
Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) Scottish philosopher, satirical writer, essayist, historian and teacher
On History.
1820s, Critical and Miscellaneous Essays (1827–1855)
“There is properly no history; only biography.”
1840s, Essays: First Series (1841), History
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Ralph Waldo Emerson727
American philosopher, essayist, and poet 1803–1882Related quotes
“History is the biography of the human race.”
Jordan Peterson (1962) Canadian clinical psychologist, cultural critic, and professor of psychology
Other
“The history of the world is but the biography of great men.”
Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) Scottish philosopher, satirical writer, essayist, historian and teacher
1840s, Heroes and Hero-Worship (1840), The Hero as Divinity
“unloved women have no biographies-- they have histories”
F. Scott Fitzgerald book The Beautiful and Damned
Source: The Beautiful and Damned
“Read no history: nothing but biography, for that is life without theory.”
Benjamin Disraeli (1804–1881) British Conservative politician, writer, aristocrat and Prime Minister
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.”
Joseph Campbell (1904–1987) American mythologist, writer and lecturer
Source: The Hero With a Thousand Faces
Milan Kundera book The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
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.
Arthur Schopenhauer book Parerga and Paralipomena
Vol. 2, Ch. 19, § 233
Parerga and Paralipomena (1851), Counsels and Maxims
Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862) 1817-1862 American poet, essayist, naturalist, and abolitionist
A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext03/7cncd10.txt (1849), Sunday <br class="br">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
Andrew Dickson White (1832–1918) American politician
Source: Seven Great Statesmen in the Warfare of Humanity with Unreason (1915), p. ix