Jacob Burckhardt Quotes

11 quotes in 253 categories

• Only the fairy tale equates changelessness with happiness...Permanence means paralysis and death. Only, in movement, with all its pain, is life.
• The seventeenth century is everywhere a time in which the state's power over everything individual increases, whether that power be in absolutist hands or may…
• The state incurs debts for politics, war, and other higher causes and 'progress'. . . . The assumption is that the future will honour this…
• True universality does not consist in knowing much but in loving much.
• Neither in the life of the individual nor in that of mankind is it desirable to know the future.
• The more recently power has originated, the less it can remain stationary - first because those who created it have become accustomed to rapid further…
• In history the way of annihilation is invariably prepared by inward degeneration, by decrease of life. Only then can a shock from outside put an…
• The biggest mischief in the past century has been perpetrated by Rousseau with his doctrine of the goodness of human nature. The mob and the…
• History is on every occasion the record of that which one age finds worthy of note in another.
• History is still in large measure poetry to me.
• To each eye, perhaps, the outlines of a great civilization present a different picture. In the wide ocean upon which we venture, the possible ways…

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