If the French noblesse had been capable of playing cricket with their peasants, their chateaux would never have been burnt.

There is no orthodoxy in walking. It is a land of many paths and no-paths, where every one goes his own and is right.

Social history might be defined negatively as the history of a people with the politics left out

"History repeats itself" and "History never repeats itself" are about equally true ... We never know enough about the infinitely complex circumstances of any past event to prophesy the future by analogy.

Since history has no properly scientific value, its only purpose is educative. And if historians neglect to educate the public, if they fail to interest it intelligently in the past, then all their historical learning is valueless except in so far as it educates themselves.

We are literally children of the earth, and removed from her our spirits wither or run to various forms of insanity. Unless we can refresh ourselves at least by intermittent contact with nature, we grow awry.

What is easy to read has been difficult to write. The labour of writing and rewriting, correcting and recorrecting, is the due exacted by every good book from its author, even if he knows from the beginning exactly what he wants to say. A limpid style is invariably the result of hard labour, and the easily flowing connection of sentence with sentence and paragraph with paragraph has always been won by the sweat of the brow.