Action springs not from thought, but from a readiness for responsibility.

Anger is a momentary madness, so control your passion or it will control you.

I never knew a man go for an honest day’s walk for whatever distance, great or small, and not have his reward in the repossession of his soul.

Social history might be defined negatively as the history of a people with the politics left out.

And how fascinating history is – the long, variegated pageant of man’s still continuing evolution of this strange planet, so much the most interesting of all the myriads of spinners through space.

After a day’s walk everything has twice its usual value.

Since history has no properly scientific value, its only purpose is educative. And if historians neglect to educate the public, if they fail to interest it intelligently in the past, then all their historical learning is valueless except in so far as it educates themselves.

The poetry of history lies in the quasi-miraculous fact that Once, on this earth, on this familiar spot of ground, walked other men and women, as actual as we are today, thinking their own thoughts, swayed by their own passions, but now all are gone, one generation vanishing after another, gone as utterly as we ourselves shall shortly be gone like ghosts at cockcrow.

Every true history must force us to remember that the past was once as real as the present and as uncertain as the future.

History is the open Bible: we historians are not priests to expound it infallibly: our function is to teach people to read it and to reflect upon it for themselves.