Jacob Burckhardt Quotes

Only the fairy tale equates changelessness with happiness...Permanence means paralysis and death. Only, in movement, with all its pain, is life.

History is on every occasion the record of that which one age finds worthy of note in another.

The essence of tyranny is the denial of complexity.

Great men are necessary for our life, in order that the movement of world history can free itself sporadically, by fits and starts, from obsolete ways of living and inconsequential talk.

In history the way of annihilation is invariably prepared by inward degeneration, by decrease of life. Only then can a shock from outside put an end to the whole.

Power is of its nature evil, whoever wields it.

There might be a fact of the greatest significance reported by Thucydides which will only be recognized as such a hundred years from now.

History is still in large measure poetry to me.

True universality does not consist in knowing much but in loving much.

Only a fairy tale calls a constant condition 'happiness'.