Explore popular quotes and sayings by a French historian Marc Bloch.
Last updated on November 21, 2024.
Marc Léopold Benjamin Bloch was a French historian. He was a founding member of the Annales School of French social history. Bloch specialised in medieval history and published widely on Medieval France over the course of his career. As an academic, he worked at the University of Strasbourg, the University of Paris, and the University of Montpellier.
The ABC of our profession is to avoid these large abstract terms in order to try to discover behind them the only concrete realities, which are human beings.
The historian is, by definition, absolutely incapable of observing the facts which he examines.
The good historian is like the giant of the fairy tale. He knows that wherever he catches the scent of human flesh, there his quarry lies.
History is, in its essentials, the science of change. It knows and it teaches that it is impossible to find two events that are ever exactly alike, because the conditions from which they spring are never identical.
But history is neither watchmaking nor cabinet construction. It is an endeavor toward better understanding.
Thenceforth they thought that, rationally concluded, doubt could become an instrument of knowledge.
The nature of our intelligence is such that it is stimulated far less by the will to know than by the will to understand.