The talent of historians lies in their creating a true ensemble out of facts which are but half true.
Interpretation
Historians craft narratives from incomplete truths, highlighting their skill in interpretation.
This quote by Ernest Renan emphasizes the role of historians in shaping our understanding of the past. It suggests that while historical facts may be only partially accurate, it is the historian's talent and creativity that allow them to weave these fragments into a coherent and insightful narrative, thus contributing to our collective memory and knowledge of history.
In practice
This quote can be used in a history class to discuss the subjectivity of historical narratives.
None of the miracles with which ancient histories are filled, occurred under scientific conditions. Observation never once contradicted, teaches us that miracles occur only in periods and countries in which they are believed in and before persons disposed to believe in them.
Man makes holy what he believes as he makes beautiful what he loves.
Forgetfulness, and I would even say historical error, are essential in the creation of a nation.
When people complain of life, it is almost always because they have asked impossible things of it.
He whom God has touched will always be a being apart: he is, whatever he may do, a stranger among men; he is marked by a sign.
Let us remember that sorrow alone is the creator of great things.
This, then, is the truth of the discourse of universal human rights: the Wall separating those covered by the umbrella of Human Rights and those excluded from its protective cover. Any reference to universal human rights as an 'unfinished project' to be gradually extended to all people is here a vain ideological chimera - and, faced with this prospect, do we, in the West, have any right to condemn the excluded when they use any means, inclusive of terror, to fight their exclusion?
All concord's born of contraries.
But above all, in order to be, never try to seem.
On a cosmic scale, our life is insignificant, yet this brief period when we appear in the world is the time in which all meaningful questions arise.
A miracle signifies nothing more than an event... the cause of which cannot be explained by another familiar instance, or.... which the narrator is unable to explain.
Persons of genius are, ex vi termini, more individual than any other people - less capable, consequently, of fitting themselves, without hurtful compression, into any of the small number of moulds which society provides in order to save its members the trouble of forming their character.
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