G. M. Trevelyan Quotes

29 Sourced Quotes

Social history might be defined negatively as the history of a people with the politics left out.

G. M. Trevelyan
[Education] has produced a vast population able to read but unable to distinguish what is worth reading, an easy prey to sensations and cheap appeals.

G. M. Trevelyan
Disinterested intellectual curiosity is the life-blood of real civilization.

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

G. M. Trevelyan
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.

G. M. Trevelyan
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.

G. M. Trevelyan
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!

G. M. Trevelyan
Man's evolution is far more extraordinary than the first chapter of Genesis used to lead people to suppose. Man's history, pre-history, ancient, medieval and modern, is by far the most wonderful thing in the Universe [about] which any news has come through to us.

G. M. Trevelyan
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.

G. M. Trevelyan
The stars out there rule the sky more than in England, big and lustrous with the honour of having shone upon the ancients and been named by them.

G. M. Trevelyan
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.

G. M. Trevelyan
I have two doctors, my left leg and my right. When body and mind are out of gear (and those twin parts of me live at such close quarters that the one always catches melancholy from the other) I know that I shall have only to call in my doctors and I shall be well again.

G. M. Trevelyan
Before modern times there was Walking, but not the perfection of Walking, because there was no tea.

G. M. Trevelyan
One outcome of the Norman Conquest was the making of the English language.... the speech of Alfred and Bede, was exiled from hall and bower, from court and cloister, and was despised as a peasant's jargon... It ceased almost, though not quite, to be a written language. … Now when a language is seldom written and is not an object of interest to scholars, it quickly adapts itself in the mouths of plain people to the needs and uses of life.... it can be altered much more easily when there are no grammarians to protest. During the three centuries when our native language was a peasant's dialect, it lost its clumsy inflexions and elaborate genders, and acquired the grace, suppleness, and adaptability which are among its chief merits.

G. M. Trevelyan
In the Stuart era, the English developed for themselves, without foreign participation or example, a system of Parliamentary government, local administration and freedom of speech and person, clean contrary to the prevailing tendencies on the continent, which was moving fast toward regal absolution, centralized bureaucracy, and the subjection of the individual to the State.

G. M. Trevelyan
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.

G. M. Trevelyan
An historical event cannot be isolated from its circumstances, any more than the onion from its skins, because an event is itself nothing but a set of circumstances, none of which will ever recur.

G. M. Trevelyan
In those days, before it became scientific, cricket was the best game in the world to watch, with its rapid sequence of amusing incidents, each ball a potential crisis!

G. M. Trevelyan
Their demands were limited and practical, and for that reasonthey successfully initiated a movement that led in the end to yet undreamt-of liberties for all.

G. M. Trevelyan
What is easy to read has been difficult to write. The labour of writing and rewriting, correcting and recorrecting, is the due exacted by every good book from its author, even if he knows from the beginning exactly what he wants to say. A limpid style is invariably the result of hard labour, and the easily flowing connection of sentence with sentence and paragraph with paragraph has always been won by the sweat of the brow.

G. M. Trevelyan
The year 1848 was the turning point at which modern history failed to turn.

G. M. Trevelyan
A man and what he loves and builds have but a day and then disappear; nature cares not—and renews the annual round untired. It is the old law, sad but not bitter. Only when man destroys the life and beauty of nature, there is the outrage.

G. M. Trevelyan
The Charter was regarded as important because it assigned definite and practical remedies to temporary evils. There was very little that was abstract in its terms, less even than later generations supposed.... A King had been brought to order, not by a posse of reactionary feudalists, but the community of the land under baronial leadership; a tyrant had been subjected to the laws which hitherto it had been his private privilege to administer and to modify at will. A process had begun which was to end in putting the power of the Crown into the hands of the community at large.

G. M. Trevelyan
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.

G. M. Trevelyan
In a world of voluble hates, he plotted to make men like, or at least tolerate one another.
Of Stanley Baldwin

G. M. Trevelyan
Socrates gave no diplomas or degrees, and would have subjected any disciple who demanded one to a disconcerting catechism on the nature of true knowledge.

G. M. Trevelyan
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.

G. M. Trevelyan
She regarded it as a first charge of her slender war-budget to see that French and Dutch independence were maintained against Philip. This was secured, partly by English help and by the holding of the seas, and partly by domestic alliance of the Calvinists with Catholic 'politiques' averse to Spanish domination; it followed that an element of liberality and toleration very rare in the Europe of that day made itself felt in France and in Holland in a manner agreeable to Elizabeth's eclectic spirit.

G. M. Trevelyan
You cannot so completely isolate any historical event from its circumstances as to be able to deduce from it a law of general application. Only politicians adorning their speeches with historical arguments have this power; and even they never agree.

G. M. Trevelyan