The value of history. ..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.

All history is the history of thought.

Parenthood is not an object of appetite or even desire. It is an object of will. There is no appetite for parenthood; there is only a purpose or intention of parenthood.

The history of thought, and therefore all history, is the re-enactment of past thought in the historian's own mind.

Perfect Freedom is reserved for the man who lives by his own work, and in that work does what he wants to do.

As a child growing up among artists I learned to think of a picture not as a finished product exposed for the admiration of the virtuosi, but as the visible record, lying about the house, of an attempt to solve a definite problem in painting.