Born with blue spectacles, you would think the world was blue and never be conscious of the existence of the distorting glass.
T. E. HulmeRead
No history can be a faithful mirror. If it were, it would be as long and as dull as life itself. It must be a selection, and, being a selection, must inevitably be biased.
Interpretation
What this quote means
History is subjective and cannot fully reflect reality without bias.
T. E. Hulme's quote highlights the inherent bias in historical narratives, suggesting that no account of the past can faithfully capture the entirety of events. Instead, history is a curated selection of experiences that inevitably favors particular perspectives, making it flawed and limited in its representation of reality.
Themes
HistoryBiasTruthSelectionPerspective
In practice
Example use cases
This quote can be used in a lecture about historiography to emphasize the subjective nature of historical writing.
More from T. E. Hulme
All quotes →All national histories are partisan and designed to give us a good conceit of ourselves.
T. E. HulmeRead
Similar quotes
In a world without future, each moment is the end of the world.
Alan LightmanRead
We are all sensible that the king and Tisaphernes have caused as many of us as they could to be apprehended, and it is plain they design, by the same treacherous means, if they can, to destroy the rest.
XenophonRead
Nations, like stars, are entitled to eclipse. All is well, provided the light returns and the eclipse does not become endless night. Dawn and resurrection are synonymous. The reappearance of the light is the same as the survival of the soul.
Victor HugoRead
That however the brains and abilities of men may differ, their stomachs are essentially the same.
F. Scott FitzgeraldRead
Imagine a poem written with such enormous three-dimensional words that we had to invent a smaller word to reference each of the big ones; that we had to rewrite the whole thing in shorthand, smashing it into two dimensions, just to talk about it. Or don’t imagine it. Look outside. Human language is our attempt at navigating God’s language; it is us running between the lines of His epic, climbing on the vowels and building houses out of the consonants.
N.D. WilsonRead
No one knows what capacities for doing and suffering he has in himself, until something comes to rouse them to activity: just as in a pond of still water, lying there like a mirror, there is no sign of the roar and thunder with which it can leap from the precipice, and yet remain what it is; or again, rise high in the air as a fountain. When water is as cold as ice, you can have no idea of the latent warmth contained in it.
Arthur SchopenhauerRead