13 Quotes by Marc Bloch

The very names we use to describe ancient ideas or vanished forms of social organization would be quite meaningless if we had not known living men.

In contrast, historical time is a concrete and living reality with an irreversible onward rush. It is the very plasma in which events are immersed, and the field within which they become intelligible.

The good historian is like the giant of the fairy tale. He knows that wherever he catches the scent of human flesh, there his quarry lies.

Let us guard against stripping our science of its share of poetry.

Thenceforth they thought that, rationally concluded, doubt could become an instrument of knowledge.

When it is a question of ascertaining whether or not some human act has really taken place, [historians] cannot be too painstaking. If they proceed to the reasons for that act, they are content with the merest appearance, ordinarily founded upon one of those maxims of common-place psychology which are neither more nor less true than their opposites.

The ABC of our profession is to avoid these large abstract terms in order to try to discover behind them the only concrete realities, which are human beings.

The nature of our intelligence is such that it is stimulated far less by the will to know than by the will to understand.

But history is neither watchmaking nor cabinet construction. It is an endeavor toward better understanding.