15 Quotes by Jacob Burckhardt

The seventeenth century is everywhere a time in which the state's power over everything individual increases, whether that power be in absolutist hands or may be considered the result of a contract, etc. People begin to dispute the sacred right of the individual ruler or authority without being aware that at the same time they are playing into the hands of a colossal state power.

The essence of tyranny is the denial of complexity.

True universality does not consist in knowing much but in loving much.

History is on every occasion the record of that which one age finds worthy of note in another.

Thus what the word Renaissance really means is new birth to liberty – the spirit of mankind recovering consciousness and the power of self-determination, recognizing the beauty of the outer world and of the body through art, liberating the reason in science and the conscience in religion, restoring culture to the intelligence, and establishing the principle of political freedom.

Great men are necessary for our life, in order that the movement of world history can free itself sporadically, by fits and starts, from obsolete ways of living and inconsequential talk.

It is the historian’s function, not to make us clever for the next time, but to make us wise forever.

History is still in large measure poetry to me.

The fates of people and of states, of entire civilizations, can depend on whether an extraordinary person can bring forth the proper strength of soul and action. Normal minds and spirits, no matter how numerous, cannot replace such a person.