We never know enough about the infinitely complex circumstances of any past event to prophesy the future by analogy.

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.

Action springs not from thought, but from a readiness for responsibility.

Without social history, economic history is barren and political history is unintelligible.

Enlarged sympathy with children was one of the chief contributions made by the Victorian English to real civilization.

One half who graduate from college never read another book.

After a day’s walk everything has twice its usual value.

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.

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.

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

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

The best historian is he who combines knowledge of the evidence with the largest intellect, the warmest human sympathy and the highest imaginative powers.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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!

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.

Every true history must force us to remember that the past was once as real as the present and as uncertain as the future.

I have two doctors, my left leg and my right.

Many who burnt heretics in the ordinary way of their business were otherwise excellent people.

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.

The best job goes to the person who can get it done without passing the buck or coming back with excuses.

Village cricket spread fast through the land.

A little man often cast a long shadow.

Anger is a momentary madness, so control your passion or it will control you.

Disinterested intellectual curiosity is the life blood of real civilization.

We are the children of the earth and removed from her our spirit withers.

Never tell a young person that anything cannot be done. God may have been waiting centuries for someone ignorant enough of the impossible to do that very thing.