History is the interpretation of the significance that the past has for us.

The eternal gulf between being and idea can only be bridged by the rainbow of imagination.

Most thoughtful Americans of today seem to have forgotten how strongly their own and immediate predecessors, Emerson, Hawthorne and Whitman, were still preoccupied with the essence behind things.

History, as the study of the past, makes the coherence of what happened comprehensible by reducing events to a dramatic pattern and seeming them in a simple form.

Culture requires in the first place a certain balance of material and spiritual values.

What the study of history and artistic creation have in common is a mode of forming images.

Whatever our creed or belief, we all know that there is no way back, that we must fight our way through.