What a man is ashamed of is always at bottom himself; and he is ashamed of himself at bottom always for being afraid.

History is for human self-knowledge. Knowing yourself means knowing, first, what it is to be a person; secondly, knowing what it is to be the kind of person you are; and thirdly, knowing what it is to be the person you are and nobody else is. Knowing yourself means knowing what you can do; and since nobody knows what they can do until they try, the only clue to what man can do is what man has done. The value of history, then, is that it teaches us what man has done and thus what man is.

The chief business of seventeenth-century philosophy was to reckon with seventeenth-century science... the chief business of twentieth-century philosophy is to reckon with twentieth-century history.

What a man is ashamed of is always at bottom himself; and he is ashamed of himself at bottom always for being afraid.

The artist must prophesy not in the sense that he foretells things to come, but in the sense that he tells his audience, at the risk of their displeasure, the secrets of their own hearts

The dance is the mother of all languages.

All history is the history of thought.