G. M. Trevelyan Quotes

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

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

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

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.

The chorus-ending from Aristophanes, raised every night from every ditch that drains into the Mediterranean, hoarse and primeval as the raven's croak, is one of the grandest tunes to walk by. Or on a night in May, one can walk through the too rare Italian forests for an hour on end and never be out of hearing of the nightingale's song.

One half who graduate from college never read another book.

Never tell a young person that anything cannot be done. God may have been waiting centuries for someone ignorant enough of the impossible to do that very thing.

If one could make alive again for other people some cobwebbed skein of old dead intrigues and breathe breath and character into dead names and stiff portraits. That is history to me!

Village cricket spread fast through the land.

I have two doctors, my left leg and my right.

The dead were and are not. Their place knows them no more and is ours today ... The poetry of history lies in the quasi-miraculous fact that once, on this earth, once, 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 gone, one generation vanishing into another, gone as utterly as we ourselves shall shortly be gone, like ghosts at cockcrow"
"Autobiography of an Historian", An Autobiography and Other Essays (1949).

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.

There is no orthodoxy in walking. It is a land of many paths and no-paths, where every one goes his own and is right.

If the French noblesse had been capable of playing cricket with their peasants, their chateaux would never have been burnt.

A little man often cast a long shadow.

Disinterested intellectual curiosity is the life blood of real civilization.

We are literally children of the earth, and removed from her our spirits wither or run to various forms of insanity. Unless we can refresh ourselves at least by intermittent contact with nature, we grow awry.

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.

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.

Many who burnt heretics in the ordinary way of their business were otherwise excellent people.