A Quote by Voltaire

History should be written as philosophy. — © Voltaire
History should be written as philosophy.
A Grecian history, perfectly written should be a complete record of the rise and progress of poetry, philosophy, and the arts.
Oddly, since by now I've written quite a lot on early modern philosophers, I didn't care for the history of philosophy, which I thought dull and obscure, until I got a minor job writing articles for a children's encyclopedia in the history of science and began to make connections between science and philosophy.
Can one understand politics without understanding history, especially the history of political thought, and will this distinguish political philosophy from some other kinds of philosophy (such as, perhaps, logic) to which the study of history is not integral?
I am opposing it with an idea of the history of philosophy as a history of philosophers, that is, a history of mortal, fragile and limited creatures like you and I. I am against the idea of clean, clearly distinct epochs in the history of philosophy or indeed in anything else. I think that history is always messy, contingent, plural and material. I am against the constant revenge of idealism in how we think about history.
The whole history of modern poetry is a continuous commentary on the short text of philosophy: every art should become science, and every science should become art; poetry and philosophy should be united.
As a universal history of philosophy, the history of philosophy must become one great unity.
Years should not be devoted to the acquisition of dead languages or to the study of history which, for the most part, is a detailed account of things that never occurred. It is useless to fill the individual with dates of great battles, with the births and deaths of kings. They should be taught the philosophy of history, the growth of nations, of philosophies, theories, and, above all, of the sciences.
In the past, history was always written by the victors. But in the age of Twitter, history is written by everyone.
It is unfortunate that so much of the history of Africa has been written by conquerors, foreigners, missionaries and adventurers. The Egyptians left the best record of their history written by local writers.
One day, I found this book at a used bookstore with 'Satanic Bible' written on the cover, and I thought maybe I should read it and see what it is. I thought it was like a religion, but then I read the book, and what was in it was pure life philosophy - and it was a life philosophy that described how I felt at that point.
Where philosophy ends, poetry must commence. There should not be a common point of view, a natural manner of thinking which standsin contrast to art and liberal education, or mere living; that is, one should not conceive of a realm of crudeness beyond the boundaries of education. Every conscious link of an organism should not perceive its limits without a feeling for its unity in relation to the whole. For example, philosophy should not only be contrasted to non-philosophy, but also to poetry.
The history of mathematics, lacking the guidance of philosophy, [is] blind, while the philosophy of mathematics, turning its back on the most intriguing phenomena in the history of mathematics, is empty.
I think I summed up my attitude to philosophy when I said: philosophy ought really to be written only as a poetic composition.
Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs?
The constancies and equivalences adumbrated work havoc with such settled topical blocks as myth and philosophy, natural reason and revelation, philosophy and religion, or the Orient with its cyclical time and Christianity with its linear history. And what is modem about the modem mind, one may ask, if Hegel, Comte, or Marx, in order to create an image of history that will support their ideological imperialism, still use the same techniques for distorting the reality of history as their Sumerian predecessors?
We must create a history of India in living terms. Up to the present that history, as written by the English, practically begins with Warren Hastings, and crams in certain unavoidable preliminaries, which cover a few thousands of years...The history of India has yet to be written for the first time. It has to be humanized, emotionalized, made the trumpet-voice and evangel of the race that inhabit India.
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