top of page
Exlpore more History quotes

"In the legal respect, after the execution of the supposed incendiaries, the other half of Moscow burned down."

"In the parlor was a huge camera on wheels like the ones used in public parks, and the backdrop of a marine twilight, painted with homemade paints, and the walls papered with pictures of children at memorable moments: the first Communion, the bunny costume, the happy birthday. Year after year, during contemplative pauses on afternoons of chess, Dr. Urbino had seen the gradual covering over of the walls, and he had often thought with a shudder of sorrow that in the gallery of casual portraits lay the germ of the future of the city, governed and corrupted by those unknown children, where note even the ashes of his glory would remain."

"That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons of history."

"History is a gallery of pictures in which there are few originals and many copies."

"Nothing is long ago in an archive, my dear. In the records we treat the dead as same as the living. that's the whole point of keeping papers. It doesn't matter if it's a hundred years or only a few weeks. It's all filed away, fresh as the day it went under the covers."

"One would have to have completely forgotten the history of science so as to not remember that the desire to know nature has had the most constant and the happiest influence on the development of mathematics."

"The errors of great men are venerable because they are more fruitful than the truths of little men."
Explore more quotes by Virginia Woolf


"I'll be blasted', he said, 'if I ever write another word, or try to write another word, to please Nick Greene or the Muse. Bad, good, or indifferent, I'll write, from this day forward, to please myself."


"Among the tortures and devastations of life is this then-our friends are not able to finish their stories."


"And the supreme mystery was simply this: here was one room; there another. Did religion solve that, or love?"


"I do not believe that gifts, whether of mind or character, can be weighed like sugar and butter."


"He felt himself now, as he had often fancied other people, adrift on the stream, and far removed from control of it, a man with no grasp upon circumstances any longer. Old battered man loafing at the doors of public-houses now seemed to be his fellows, and he felt, as he supposed them to feel, a mingling of envy and hatred towards those who passed quickly and certainly to a goal of their own. They, too, saw things very thin and shadowy, and were wafted about by the lightest breath of wind. For the substantial world, with its prospect of avenues leading on and on to the invisible distance, had slipped from him."


"Women have sat indoors all these millions of years, so that by this time the very walls are permeated by their creative force, which has, indeed, so overcharged the capacity of bricks and mortar that it must needs harness itself to pens and brushes and business and politics."


"You cannot, it seems, let children run about the streets. People who have seen them running wild in Russia say that the sight is not a pleasant one."
bottom of page