Fernand Braudel Quotes

11 Sourced Quotes

Everything must be recaptured and relocated in the general framework of history, so that despite the difficulties, the fundamental paradoxes and contradictions, we may respect the unity of history which is also the unity of life.

Fernand Braudel
The earth is, like our own skin, fated to carry the scars of ancient wounds.

Fernand Braudel
The key problem is to find out why that sector of society of the past, which I would not hesitate to call capitalist, should have lived as if in a bell jar, cut off from the rest; why was it not able to expand and conquer the whole of society?... [Why was it that] a significant rate of capital formation was possible only in certain sectors and not in the whole market economy of the time?

Fernand Braudel
For the historian everything begins and ends with time, a mathematical, godlike
time, a notion easily mocked, time external to men, 'exogenous,' as economists
would say, pushing men, forcing them, and painting their own individual times
the same color: it is, indeed, the imperious time of the world.

Fernand Braudel
There were two, three or four French Revolutions. Like a multi-stage rocket today, the Revolution involved several successive explosions and propellant thrusts.

Fernand Braudel
Leadership of a world-economy is an experience of power which may blind the victor to the march of history.

Fernand Braudel
Intellectuals are always fascinated by the impossible.

Fernand Braudel
Can there be any study of humanity, in 1946, without historians who are ambitious, conscious of their duties and of their immense powers?

Fernand Braudel
There are always some areas world history does not reach, zones of silence and undisturbed ignorance.

Fernand Braudel
Events are the ephemera of history; they pass across its stage like fireflies, hardly glimpsed before they settle back into darkness and as often as not into oblivion. Every event, however brief, has to be sure a contribution to make, lights up some dark corner or even some wide vista of history.

Fernand Braudel
The companies only developed if the state did not intervene in the French fashion. If on the contrary a certain degree of economic freedom was the rule, capitalism moved in firmly and adapted itself to all administrative quirks and difficulties

Fernand Braudel