Similarly, when it is not the past that we are studying, but some set of phenomena relating to a principle still active, we expect to be told whenever a new piece of evidence may emerge, in the light of which it is quite possible that the whole elaborate structure of our conclusions will have to be changed.

No doubt they thought that by allowing themselves to become martyrs to their nerves they were giving proof of a fine stoicism, just as by living in a continual rush they produced in their own minds an illusion of activity.

History is, in its essentials, the science of change. It knows and it teaches that it is impossible to find two events that are ever exactly alike, because the conditions from which they spring are never identical.

The historian is, by definition, absolutely incapable of observing the facts which he examines.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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