Quotes About History
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson was a towering figure in American literary and intellectual life during the
His contribution was central to the emergence of that New England Transcendentalism out from which
also emerged such figures as Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Walt Whitman and Louisa May Alcott.
Emerson urged that people should embrace a transcendentalist approach to history as the following
quotes about history demonstrate:-
"A man is a bundle of relations, a knot of
roots, whose flower and fruitage is the world."
"There is one mind common to all individual men.
Of the works of this mind history is the record.
Man is explicable by nothing less than all his history.
all the facts of history preëxist as laws. Each law
in turn is made by circumstances predominant. The
creation of a thousand forests is in one acorn, and Egypt,
Greece, Rome, Gaul, Britain, America, lie folded already in the
first man. Epoch after epoch, camp, kingdom, empire, republic,
democracy, are merely the application of this manifold spirit to
the manifold world".
"We sympathize in the great moments of history, in
the great discoveries, the great resistances, the great
prosperities of men;---because there law was enacted, the sea
was searched, the land was found, or the blow was struck
for us, as we ourselves in that place would have done
no longer shall be a dull book. It shall walk incarnate in
every just and wise man. You shall not tell me by language and
titles a catalogue of the volumes you have read. You shall
make me feel what periods you have lived."