Jacob Burckhardt Quotes

Nothing in the world is better suited to laziness than orthodoxy. If you gag your mouth, stop up your ears and put a blinder over your eyes, you can sleep peacefully.

— Jacob Burckhardt

“The seventeenth century is everywhere a time in which the state's power over everything individual increases, whether that power be in absolutist hands or may be considered the result of a contract, etc. People begin to dispute the sacred right of the individual ruler or authority without being aware that at the same time they are playing into the hands of a colossal state power.”

— Jacob Burckhardt

Only the fairy tale equates changelessness with happiness ... Permanence means paralysis and death. Only, in movement, with all its pain, is life.

— Jacob Burckhardt

“The state incurs debts for politics, war, and other higher causes and 'progress' ... The assumption is that the future will honour this relationship in perpetuity. The state has learned from the merchants and industrialists how to exploit credit; it defies the nation ever to let it go into bankruptcy. Alongside all swindlers the state now stands there as swindler-in-chief.”

— Jacob Burckhardt

“History is on every occasion the record of that which one age finds worthy of note in another.”

— Jacob Burckhardt

“The biggest mischief in the past century has been perpetrated by Rousseau with his doctrine of the goodness of human nature. The mob and the intellectuals derived from it the vision of a Golden Age which would arrive without fail once the noble human race could act according to its whims.”

— Jacob Burckhardt

Great men are necessary for our life, in order that the movement of world history can free itself sporadically, by fits and starts, from obsolete ways of living and inconsequential talk.

— Jacob Burckhardt

“In history the way of annihilation is invariably prepared by inward degeneration, by decrease of life. Only then can a shock from outside put an end to the whole.”

— Jacob Burckhardt

The essence of tyranny is the denial of complexity.

— Jacob Burckhardt

Neither in the life of the individual nor in that of mankind is it desirable to know the future.

— Jacob Burckhardt

“There might be a fact of the greatest significance reported by Thucydides which will only be recognized as such a hundred years from now.”

— Jacob Burckhardt

“True universality does not consist in knowing much but in loving much.”

— Jacob Burckhardt

“To each eye, perhaps, the outlines of a great civilization present a different picture. In the wide ocean upon which we venture, the possible ways and directions are many; and the same studies which have served for my work might easily, in other hands, not only receive a wholly different treatment and application, but lead to essentially different conclusions.”

— Jacob Burckhardt

“History is still in large measure poetry to me.”

— Jacob Burckhardt

Power is of its nature evil, whoever wields it.

— Jacob Burckhardt

Only a fairy tale calls a constant condition 'happiness'.

— Jacob Burckhardt

“The whole life of Demosthenes ... leaves the impression of a melancholy state of things, and of the brazen insolence of wickedness. A particularly striking idea of how things really were in Greece can be obtained from one feature of life - the sons who turned out badly ... the sons of gifted but arrogant fathers turned out merely arrogant, the grandsons hopeless; it is respect alone that sustains families and gives them traditions.”

— Jacob Burckhardt

“The more recently power has originated, the less it can remain stationary - first because those who created it have become accustomed to rapid further movement and because they are and will be innovators per se; secondly, because the forces aroused or subdued by them can be employed only through further acts ...”

— Jacob Burckhardt