The narrative of history we write with our lives forgets us, recording only our aggregate effect on the world.
History
Knowing how minutes pass, we know how millennia pass.
A museum's famous paintings glow with oil pigments from the restorer's, not the artist's, brush.
The past has never existed, only a history of previous presents.
In a few hundred years, solar energy will be as cutting edge as firewood.
Perhaps the more terrifying thought about World War II Germany is not that the Jews were ordinary people like us, but that the Nazis were too.
In the beginning, humanity solves the problems nature made; in the end, the problems our own ingenuity made.
The modern poor live in more luxury than wealthy ancients.
I do not want to see Michelangelo’s paintings, but Michelangelo painting.
Living fully in the present requires living partly in the past.
War and water are two chaoses combined.
Politicians lie and slander to win elections, but in centuries past, would-be kings cut off each other's heads to gain the crown. Civilization is making progress.
Mr. Stanley’s Aphorisms and Paradoxes are outstanding examples of the long-form aphorism...
inevitably studded with discrete individual aphorisms that could easily stand on their own.
-James Geary, author of The World in a Phrase: A Brief History of the Aphorism
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