Pieter Geyl Quotes

Let's say that history is what happened. The record of what happened is how each individual happens to see those events. They've already been filtered. When the historian or biographer takes over, history is no longer exactly what happened, because there has been a process of selection going on; it's impossible to write about anyone, any event, in any period of time, without in some way imposing, even unconsciously, your own standards, your own values.

All historical writing, even the most honest, is unconsciously subjective, since every age is bound, in spite of itself, to make the dead perform whatever tricks it finds necessary for its own peace of mind.

The writer of history is perhaps closer to the artist than the scholar.

History's like a story in a way: it depends on who's telling it.

I write fiction, there's no guarantee that what I say is truthful.

History is a capricious creature. It depends on who writes it.

A man without a bias cannot write interesting history - if indeed such a man exists.

We are never real historians, but always near poets, and our emotion is perhaps nothing but an expression of a poetry that was lost.

I think that every so-called history book and film biography should be prefaced by the statement that what follows is the author's rendition of events and circumstances.

History is what we bring to it, not just the events themselves, but how we interpret those events.

I lay no claim, it should be clear, to being a historian. So in my books, the intimate and personal have been intertwined inextricably with the broad and historical.

I was thinking of writing a little foreword saying that history is, after all, based on people's recollections, which change with time.

History is not what happened. It is what people wrote about what happened.

All the great history has been written with passion …. Fiction is history from below.

History is what we would make of it.

History is a fiction which actually happened; fiction is history which could have happened.

All historians are prisoners of their own experience. We bring to history the preconceptions of our personalities and our age.

It is not possible to completely eliminate mediation between you as an observer and the history you are trying to understand.

Even the most meticulous historians work subjectively. The historian's point of view, his or her selection of subject and sources, the emphasis, the tone - all of these lead to subjective history, inevitably so. I do not say this as a criticism, merely as an observation.

I am beginning to believe that nothing can ever be proved. These are honest hypotheses which take the facts into account: but I sense so definitely that they come from me, and that they are simply a way of unifying my own knowledge. Not a glimmer comes from Rollebon's side. Slow, lazy, sulky, the facts adapt themselves to the rigour of the order I wish to give them; but it remains outside of them. I have the feeling of doing a work of pure imagination.

The writing of history reflects the interests, predilections, and even prejudices of a given generation.

So much history, if you or I were to write it, could seem a fiction. These separations, these lines that tell us this is fiction or non-fiction, that this is history or this is a novel, are often useless.

The writing of histories - as Goethe once noted - is one way of getting rid of the weight of the past.... The writing of history liberates us from history.

History -- its what those bitter old men write.

The contemporary historian never writes such a true history as the historian of a later generation.