Intellectual History Quotes

“History, too, has a penchant for giving birth
to itself over and over again, and those whom it
appoints agents of change and progress
do not always accept their destinies willingly.”
― Aberjhani, Splendid Literarium: A Treasury of Stories, Aphorisms, Poems, and Essays

“Intellectual progress usually occurs through sheer abandonment of questions together with both of the alternatives they assume -- an abandonment that results from their decreasing vitality and a change of urgent interest. We do not solve them: we get over them.”
― John Dewey, The Influence of Darwin on Philosophy and Other Essays

“Indeed, as some historians observe, the changing relationships of readers to text over time can be seen as one index of the history of thought.”
― Maryanne Wolf, Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain

“But he had expressed to Mme. du Chatelet the hope that a way out might lie in applying philosophy to history, and endeavoring to trace, beneath the flux of political events, the history of the human mind. 'Only philosophers should write history,' he said. 'In all nations, history is disfigured by fable, till at last philosophy comes to enlighten man; and when it does finally arrive in the midst of darkness, it finds the human mind so blinded centuries of error, that it can hardly undeceive it; it finds ceremonies, facts and monuments, heaped up to prove lies.' 'History,' he concludes, 'is after all nothing but a pack of tricks which we play upon the dead;' we transform the past to suit our wishes for the future, and in the upshot 'history proves that anything can be proved by history.”
― Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy: The Lives and Opinions of the World's Greatest Philosophers

“We are like dwarfs standing on the shoulders of giants; thanks to them, we see farther than they. Busying ourselves with the treatises written by the ancients, we take their choice thoughts, buried by age and human neglect, and we raise them, as it were from death to renewed life." -Peter of Blois (d. 1212).”
― Carter Lindberg, The European Reformations

“Humankind doesn’t have a genuine intellectual memory. They don’t need the Truth. They don’t want to know the Truth.”
― Robert Neil Fleischer, Alien Biography

“Given the focus on language, it should come as no surprise that this book deals with what individuals said and published … The new “linguistic” emphasis of modern scholarship has added to our understanding of the past … Throughout, “language” is not recovered divorced from its historical context, but linked to the individuals who used it, and to their (and others’) actions and activities”
― Paul Readman, Land and Nation in England: Patriotism, National Identity, and the Politics of Land, 1880-1914

“Conceptual historians of various stripes asked after the origins of ideas, but they sought them by tracing the changing meanings of words across different socio-historical contexts. My concern, by contrast, is with the practical origins of ideas: with the ways in which the ideas we live by can be shown to be rooted in practical needs and concerns generated by certain facts about us and our situation.”
― Matthieu Queloz, The Practical Origins of Ideas: Genealogy as Conceptual Reverse-Engineering