history

History chews up sexually uncertain boys, and spits us out as recycled, generic greeting cards for lonely old men.

Only the learned read old books, and... now... they are of all men the least likely to acquire wisdom by doing so. ...[G]reat scholars are now as little nourished by the past as the most ignorant mechanic who holds that "history is bunk..." [for] ...when a learned man is presented with any statement in an ancient author, the one question he never asks is whether it is true. He asks who influenced the ancient writer, and how far the statement is consistent with what he said in other books, and what phase in the writer's development, or in the general history of thought, it illustrates, and how it affected later writers, and how often it has been misunderstood (specially by the learned man's colleagues) and what the general course of criticism on it has been for the last ten years, and what is the "present state of the question." To regard the ancient writer as a possible source of knowledge-to anticipate that what he said could possibly modify your thoughts or your behavior-this would be rejected as unutterably simple-minded. ... [Therefore, even though] learning makes a free commerce between the ages... every generation [is cut] off from all others... [and] ...characteristic errors of one [are not] corrected by the characteristic truths of another.

As we were told about others, so others will be told about us. that is "HISTORY". and the most painfull thing about it is that, it does not repeat itself. it comes onece in life and never again.

Its really hard to recall the day you became friends with special people.

Never make enemies of anyone younger or healthier than you are. They write your history.

Libraries are sanctuaries from the world and command centers onto it: here in the quiet rooms are the lives of Crazy Horse and Aung San Suu Kyi, the Hundred Years' War and the Opium Wars and the Dirty War, the ideas of Simone Weil and Lao-Tzu, information on building your sailboat or dissolving your marriage, fictional worlds and books to equip the reader to reenter the real world. They are, ideally, places where nothing happens and where everything that has happened is stored up to be remembered and relived, the place where the world is folded up into boxes of paper. Every book is a door that opens onto another world, which might be the magic that all those children's books were alluding to, and a library is a Milky Way of worlds.

Better to have to retrace your steps and then move forward than never to move forward at all.

I see a cathedral, for instance, one that__ stood for centuries and I marvel and I wonder... How many people passed through the doors? What did they pray for? How many wars did they wish to see ended? How many christenings, weddings, and funerals? Same thing with a record, I guess. Who bought it? Did they ever make love while it was playing? How many times did they read the notes in the cover? Did a song on the album change their life? I suppose it's odd to think about things like that.

The present is not so glorious but that I should wish to dwell a little in the past.

Hope is soothing, but it can become deceptive if we cling to it as the last resort against reality,

...History is the key to the unity of a people. Its nostalgia pulls them together. Its gloom separates them further. Its successes make them stronger.

It is not death that allows us to understand each other, but poetry.

The good shall prevail in the end, the truth shall be the rule and the Cameroonian soul shall be free,_ Hans said in an emotion-choked voice, __owever, we should never lose our heads; we should always be prepared to forgive all the repentant souls.

The Cameroonian soul is genuine. It is noble, and it embodies humanism.

Take a stand that reflects the widest horizons of your soul if you don__ want to be a slave to external powers.

What is there in this big wide world for a man to talk about with certainty besides his homeland, home and family?

True heroes don't fall. They only encounter temporary setbacks as they forge ahead towards progress.

_what else do we have to ensure our sanity except our love for something beyond ourselves__ur love for our families, our love for our fatherland?