Facts Quote by Jacob Burckhardt

To each eye, perhaps, the outlines of a great civilization present a different picture. In the wide ocean upon which we venture, the possible…

— Jacob Burckhardt

The essence of tyranny is the denial of complexity.

— Jacob Burckhardt

Great men are necessary for our life, in order that the movement of world history can free itself sporadically, by fits and starts, from…

— Jacob Burckhardt

Only a fairy tale calls a constant condition 'happiness'.

— Jacob Burckhardt

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…

— Jacob Burckhardt

The biggest mischief in the past century has been perpetrated by Rousseau with his doctrine of the goodness of human nature. The mob and…

— Jacob Burckhardt

History is on every occasion the record of that which one age finds worthy of note in another.

— Jacob Burckhardt

The state incurs debts for politics, war, and other higher causes and 'progress'. . . . The assumption is that the future will honour…

— Jacob Burckhardt

True universality does not consist in knowing much but in loving much.

— Jacob Burckhardt

Neither in the life of the individual nor in that of mankind is it desirable to know the future.

— Jacob Burckhardt

Power is of its nature evil, whoever wields it.

— Jacob Burckhardt

Only the fairy tale equates changelessness with happiness...Permanence means paralysis and death. Only, in movement, with all its pain, is life.

— Jacob Burckhardt