All history is the history of thought.

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.

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 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.

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

Every new generation must rewrite history in its own way.

A man ceases to be a beginner in any given science and becomes a master in that science when he has learned that... he is going to be a beginner all his life.