Inspiring History Quotes to Ignite Your Passion

"Those that fail to learn from history, are doomed to repeat it."

- Winston Churchill

"Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it."

- George Santayana

"If you don’t know history, then you don’t know anything. You are a leaf that doesn’t know it is part of a tree."

- Michael Crichton

"Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people's thinking."

- Steve Jobs

"In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life: it goes on."

- Robert Frost

"You have brains in your head. You have feet in your shoes. You can steer yourself any direction you choose."

- Dr. Seuss

"Many of life's failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up."

- Thomas Edison

"History is only the register of crimes and misfortunes."

- Voltaire

"Life is either a daring adventure or nothing at all."

- Helen Keller

"Never let the fear of striking out keep you from playing the game."

- Babe Ruth

"The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched — they must be felt with the heart."

- Helen Keller

"Spread love everywhere you go. Let no one ever come to you without leaving happier."

- Mother Teresa

"The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams."

- Eleanor Roosevelt

"The greatest glory in living lies not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall."

- Oliver Goldsmith

"You will face many defeats in life, but never let yourself be defeated."

- Maya Angelou

"We learn from history that we learn nothing from history."

- George Bernard Shaw

"The way to get started is to quit talking and begin doing."

- Walt Disney

"Keep smiling, because life is a beautiful thing and there's so much to smile about."

- Marilyn Monroe

"Go confidently in the direction of your dreams! Live the life you've imagined."

- Henry David Thoreau

"The purpose of our lives is to be happy."

- Dalai Lama

"Only a life lived for others is a life worthwhile."

- Albert Einstein

"The very ink with which history is written is merely fluid prejudice."

- Mark Twain

"In this life we cannot do great things. We can only do small things with great love."

- Mother Teresa

"Love the life you live. Live the life you love."

- Bob Marley

"A generation which ignores history has no past and no future."

- Robert Heinlein

"Go confidently in the direction of your dreams! Live the life you’ve imagined."

- Henry David Thoreau

"Success is not final; failure is not fatal: It is the courage to continue that counts."

- Winston Churchill

"Always remember you have within you the strength, the patience and the passion to reach for the stars to change the world."

- Harriet Tubman

"If there is no struggle, there is no progress."

- Frederick Douglass

"Never give up, for that is just the place and time that the tide will turn."

- Harriet Stowe

"1848 remains a seed-plot of history. It crystallized ideas and projected the pattern of things to come; it determined the course of the following century."

- Lewis Namier

"The only impossible journey is the one you never begin."

- Anthony Robbins

"A small body of determined spirits fired by an unquenchable faith in their mission can alter the course of history."

- Mohandas Gandhi

"What is history but a fable agreed upon?"

- Napoleon Bonaparte

"A people without the knowledge of their past history, origin and culture is like a tree without roots."

- Marcus Garvey

"In the end, it's not the years in your life that count. It's the life in your years."

- Abraham Lincoln

"Whoever wishes to foresee the future must consult the past; for human events ever resemble those of preceding times."

- Machiavelli

"Rulers, Statesmen, Nations, are wont to be emphatically commended to the teaching which experience offers in history. But what experience and history teach is this - that people and governments never have learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it."

- G. W. F. Hegel

"History does nothing; it does not possess immense riches, it does not fight battles. It is men, real, living, who do all this."

- Karl Marx

"I like the dreams of the future better than the history of the past."

- Thomas Jefferson

"There is a history in all men's lives."

- William Shakespeare

"Only the vanquished remember history."

- Marshall McLuhan

"Live out of your imagination, not your history."

- Stephen Covey

"We are not makers of history. We are made by history."

- Martin Luther King, Jr.

"Human nature will not change. In any future great national trial, compared with the men of this, we shall have as weak and as strong, as silly and as wise, as bad and as good. Let us therefore study the incidents in this as philosophy to learn wisdom from and none of them as wrongs to be avenged."

- Abraham Lincoln

"Before anything else, preparation is the key to success."

- Alexander Graham Bell

"Many of life’s failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up."

- Thomas Edison

"Success usually comes to those who are too busy to be looking for it."

- Henry David Thoreau

"We spend a great deal of time studying history, which, let's face it, is mostly the history of stupidity."

- Stephen Hawking

"In history, a great volume is unrolled for our instruction, drawing the materials of future wisdom from the past errors and infirmities of mankind."

- Edmund Burke

"History has demonstrated that the most notable winners usually encountered heartbreaking obstacles before they triumphed. They won because they refused to become discouraged by their defeats."

- B. C. Forbes

"A generation which ignores history has no past -- and no future."

- Robert A. Heinlein

"Men make history and not the other way around. In periods where there is no leadership, society stands still. Progress occurs when courageous, skillful leaders seize the opportunity to change things for the better."

- Harry S. Truman

"Life is what happens when you're busy making other plans."

- John Lennon

"When you reach the end of your rope, tie a knot in it and hang on."

- FDR

"Tell me and I forget. Teach me and I remember. Involve me and I learn."

- Benjamin Franklin

"It is during our darkest moments that we must focus to see the light."

- Aristotle

"Whoever is happy will make others happy too."

- Anne Frank

"If life were predictable it would cease to be life and be without flavor."

- Eleanor Roosevelt

"Life is a succession of lessons which must be lived to be understood."

- Helen Keller

"You only live once, but if you do it right, once is enough."

- Mae West

"Live in the sunshine, swim the sea, drink the wild air."

- Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Life is really simple, but we insist on making it complicated."

- Confucius

"May you live all the days of your life."

- Jonathan Swift

"Life itself is the most wonderful fairy tale."

- Hans Christian Andersen

"Do not let making a living prevent you from making a life."

- John Wooden

"Life is ours to be spent, not to be saved."

- D. H. Lawrence

"Life is a long lesson in humility."

- J.M. Barrie

"Life is made of ever so many partings welded together."

- Charles Dickens

"Life is trying things to see if they work."

- Ray Bradbury

"History will be kind to me for I intend to write it."

- Winston S. Churchill

"Human nature will not change. In any future great national trial, compared with the men of this, we shall have as weak and as strong, as silly and as wise, as bad and as good."

- Abraham Lincoln

"History is for human self-knowledge ... the only clue to what man can do is what man has done."

- R. G. Collingwood

"Never doubt that you can change history. You already have."

- Marge Piercy

"History cannot give us a program for the future, but it can give us a fuller understanding of ourselves, and of our common humanity, so that we can better face the future."

- Robert Penn Warren

"Always remember that you are absolutely unique. Just like everyone else."

- Margaret Mead

"Don't judge each day by the harvest you reap but by the seeds that you plant."

- Robert Louis Stevenson

"It is remarkable how closely the history of the apple tree is connected with that of man."

- Henry David Thoreau

"The best prophet of the future is the past."

- Lord Byron

"The main thing is to make history, not to write it."

- Otto von Bismarck

"The only history is a mere question of one’s struggle inside oneself. But that is the joy of it. One need neither discover Americas nor conquer nations, and yet one has as great a work as Columbus or Alexander, to do."

- D. H. Lawrence

"Our history is not our destiny."

- Alan Cohen

"An account, mostly false, of events, mostly unimportant, which are brought about by rulers, mostly knaves, and soldiers, mostly fools."

- Ambrose Bierce

"History is written by the victors."

- Winston Churchill

"History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce."

- Karl Marx

"Big jobs usually go to the men who prove their ability to outgrow small ones."

- Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Letting go means to come to the realization that some people are a part of your history, but not a part of your destiny."

- Steve Maraboli

"A single twig breaks, but the bundle of twigs is strong."

- Tecumseh

"Things have never been more like the way they are today in history."

- Dwight D. Eisenhower

"If history were taught in the form of stories, it would never be forgotten."

- Rudyard Kipling

"The soul becomes dyed with the colour of its thoughts."

- Marcus Aurelius

"To study history means submitting to chaos and nevertheless retaining faith in order and meaning."

- Hermann Hesse

"The best moments in reading are when you come across something – a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things – which you had thought special and particular to you. Now here it is, set down by someone else, a person you have never met, someone even who is long dead. And it is as if a hand has come out and taken yours."

- Alan Bennett

"I can only note that the past is beautiful because one never realises an emotion at the time. It expands later, and thus we don't have complete emotions about the present, only about the past."

- Virginia Woolf

"Many of the greatest crimes in history were caused not by hatred, but rather by indifference. They were caused by people who could have done something, but did not even bother lifting a finger."

- Yuval Noah Harari

"If you don't know history, then you don't know anything. You are a leaf that doesn't know it is part of a tree."

- Michael Crichton

"History is nothing but assisted and recorded memory."

- George Santayana

"Together we must learn how to compose difference, not with arms, but with intellect and decent purpose."

- Dwight D. Eisenhower

"Ideas shape the course of history."

- John Maynard Keynes

"The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history."

- George Orwell

"History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme."

- Mark Twain

"One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back."

- Carl Sagan

"Study the past if you would define the future."

- Confucius

"History, like love, is so apt to surround her heroes with an atmosphere of imaginary brightness."

- James Fenimore Cooper

"History is always written by the winners. When two cultures clash, the loser is obliterated, and the winner writes the history books-books which glorify their own cause and disparage the conquered foe. As Napoleon once said, 'What is history, but a fable agreed upon?"

- Dan Brown

"History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake."

- James Joyce

"Those who do not move, do not notice their chains."

- Rosa Luxemburg

"History is a set of lies agreed upon."

- Napoleon Bonaparte

"Remember, remember always, that all of us, and you and I especially, are descended from immigrants and revolutionists."

- Franklin D. Roosevelt

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

- Aldous Huxley

"The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there."

- L.P. Hartley

"Those who don't know history are doomed to repeat it."

- Edmund Burke

"There are only patterns, patterns on top of patterns, patterns that affect other patterns. Patterns hidden by patterns. Patterns within patterns. If you watch close, history does nothing but repeat itself. What we call chaos is just patterns we haven't recognized. What we call random is just patterns we can't decipher. what we can't understand we call nonsense. What we can't read we call gibberish. There is no free will. There are no variables."

- Chuck Palahniuk

"People have an annoying habit of remembering things they shouldn't."

- Christopher Paolini

"Every moment happens twice: inside and outside, and they are two different histories."

- Zadie Smith

"The world is changed because you are made of ivory and gold. The curves of your lips rewrite history."

- Oscar Wilde

"I was alive when the Dead Sea was just a lake that was feeling a little poorly."

- Cassandra Clare

"The first duty of a man is to think for himself."

- Jose Marti

"If anyone tells you that a certain person speaks ill of you, do not make excuses about what is said of you but answer, "He was ignorant of my other faults, else he would not have mentioned these alone.""

- Epictetus

"We'll be remembered more for what we destroy than what we create."

- Chuck Palahniuk

"Never say more than is necessary."

- Richard Brinsley Sheridan

"Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail."