Marc Bloch > Quotes

“But history is neither watchmaking nor cabinet construction. It is an endeavor toward better understanding.”
― Marc Bloch

“Let us guard against stripping our science of its share of poetry.”
― Marc Bloch, The Historian's Craft

“The very names we use to describe ancient ideas or vanished forms of social organization would be quite meaningless if we had not known living men.”
― Marc Bloch, The Historian's Craft: Reflections on the Nature and Uses of History and the Techniques and Methods of Those Who Write It.

“The good historian is like the giant of the fairy tale. He knows that wherever he catches the scent of human flesh, there his quarry lies.”
― Marc Bloch, The Historian's Craft: Reflections on the Nature and Uses of History and the Techniques and Methods of Those Who Write It.

“Thenceforth they thought that, rationally concluded, doubt could become an instrument of knowledge.”
― Marc Bloch, The Historian's Craft: Reflections on the Nature and Uses of History and the Techniques and Methods of Those Who Write It.

“Understanding,' in all honesty, is a word pregnant with difficulties, but also with hope.”
― Marc Bloch, The Historian's Craft: Reflections on the Nature and Uses of History and the Techniques and Methods of Those Who Write It.

“No doubt they thought that by allowing themselves to become martyrs to their nerves they were giving proof of a fine stoicism, just as by living in a continual rush they produced in their own minds an illusion of activity.”
― Marc Bloch, Strange Defeat

“How pleasant it is', says the Roman poet, 'to listen to a storm from the safe shelter of the shore.”
― Marc Bloch, Strange Defeat

“When it is a question of ascertaining whether or not some human act has really taken place, [historians] cannot be too painstaking. If they proceed to the reasons for that act, they are content with the merest appearance, ordinarily founded upon one of those maxims of common-place psychology which are neither more nor less true than their opposites.”
― Marc Bloch

“Para quien no sea un tonto de marca mayor, todas las ciencias son interesantes, pero cada sabio solo encuentra una cuyo cultivo le divierte. Descubrirla para consagrarse a ella es propiamente lo q se llama vocación”
― Marc Bloch, Introducción a la Historia

“In a word, a historical phenomenon can never be understood apart from its moment in time. This is true of ever evolutionary stage, our own and all others. As the old Arab proverb has it: 'Men resemble their times more than they do their fathers.”
― Marc Bloch, The Historian's Craft: Reflections on the Nature and Uses of History and the Techniques and Methods of Those Who Write It.

“Le doute méthodique est d'ordinaire le signe d'une bonne santé mentale : c'est pourquoi des soldats harassés, au coeur trouble ne pouvaient le pratiquer”
― Marc Bloch

“I do not say that the past entirely governs the present, but I do maintain that we shall never satisfactorily understand the present unless we take the past into account.”
― Marc Bloch, Strange Defeat

“In contrast, historical time is a concrete and living reality with an irreversible onward rush. It is the very plasma in which events are immersed, and the field within which they become intelligible.”
― Marc Bloch, The Historian's Craft: Reflections on the Nature and Uses of History and the Techniques and Methods of Those Who Write It.

“By concentrating attention on matters concerned with the earning of their daily bread, they ran the risk of discovering that there might be no daily bread to earn.”
― Marc Bloch, Strange Defeat

“The world belongs to those who are in love with the new.”
― Marc Bloch, Strange Defeat

“For it is an undoubted truth that unless virtue is accompanied by severe self-criticism, it always runs the risk of turning against its own most dearly held convictions.”
― Marc Bloch, Strange Defeat

“Similarly, when it is not the past that we are studying, but some set of phenomena relating to a principle still active, we expect to be told whenever a new piece of evidence may emerge, in the light of which it is quite possible that the whole elaborate structure of our conclusions will have to be changed.”
― Marc Bloch, Strange Defeat

“Detrás de los rasgos sensibles del paisaje, de las herramientas o de las máquinas, detrás de los escritos aparentemente más fríos, y de las instituciones aparentemente más distanciadas de los q las han creado, la historia quiere aprender a los hombres”
― Marc Bloch, Introducción a la Historia

“... in a world which stands upon the threshold of the chemistry of the atom, which is only beginning to fathom the mystery of interstellar space ... this poor world of ours which, however justifiably proud of its science, has created so little happiness for itself ...”
― Marc Bloch, The Historian's Craft: Reflections on the Nature and Uses of History and the Techniques and Methods of Those Who Write It.

“For there can be no salvation where there is not some sacrifice, and no national liberty in the fullest sense unless we have ourselves worked to bring it about.”
― Marc Bloch, Strange Defeat

“Defender la alegría como una trinchera, defenderla del escándalo y la rutina, de la miseria y los miserables, de las ausencias transitorias y las definitivas”
― Marc Bloch, Introducción a la Historia

“Men's memories are short. Such times are real only to a handful of old fogies who live out their lives among the musty tomes of ancient libraries The average human being finds in the immediate past a convenient screen to set between himself and the distant truths of history. It keeps him from realizing that the embalmed tragedies of an older day may once again become realities.”
― Marc Bloch, Strange Defeat

“No hay menos belleza en una exacta ecuación q en una frase precisa. Pero cada ciencia tiene su propio lenguaje estético”
― Marc Bloch, Introducción a la Historia

“It is one of the privileges of the true man of action that, when the critical moment comes, blemishes of character are effaced, while virtues, till then potential merely, are seen in an unexpectedly vivid light.”
― Marc Bloch, Strange Defeat

“The special study which, in the course of my researches, I have made of the life of the countryside has convinced me that we can truly understand the past only if we read it by the light of the present.”
― Marc Bloch

“La incomprensión del presente nace fatalmente de la ignorancia del pasado”
― Marc Bloch, Os Reis Taumaturgos: Estudo sobre o caráter sobrenatural atribuído ao poder régio particularmente na França e na Inglaterra

“Somos os vencidos provisórios de um injusto destino.”
― Marc Bloch

“Robespierristes, antirobespierristes, nous vous crions grâce: par pitié, dites-nous, simplement, quel fut Robespierre.”
― Marc Bloch

“Men are so made that they will face expected dangers in expected places a great deal more easily than the sudden appearance of deadly peril from behind a turn in the road which they have been led to suppose is perfectly safe.”
― Marc Bloch, Strange Defeat