Hilary Mantel (Dame Hilary Mary Mantel) Quotes

Hindsight is the historian's necessary vice.

Hilary Mantel

• Historian
• Vices
• Hindsight

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Quotes to Explore

• I was a senior high school student at the Far Eastern University when the war with Japan broke out in 1941.

  

  F. Sionil Jose
  • School
  • War
  • High

• Knowing what I knew about Russia, as much as I loved the music and was fascinated by the songs and the whole idea of it, I knew it would be a very lengthy and frustrating process.

  

  Marc Almond Soft Cell
  • Music
  • Process
  • Loved

• The most important single thing about string theory is that it's a highly mathematical theory, and the mathematics holds together in a very tight and consistent way. It contains in its basic structure both quantum mechanics and the theory of gravity. That's big news.

  

  Leonard Susskind
  • Important
  • Together
  • Single

• Value all books in proportion as they are agreeable to Scripture. Those that are nearest to it are the best, and those that are farthest from it, and most contrary to it, the worst.

  

  J. C. Ryle
  • Value
  • Scripture

• I filled my sketchbook with drawings, very much as any educated girl of my generation might have kept a diary.

  

  Gabriele Munter
  • Girl
  • Drawing
  • Generations

• Rosencrantz: Shouldn't we be doing something--constructive? Guildenstern: What did you have in mind? ... A short, blunt human pyramid...?

  

  Tom Stoppard
  • Mind
  • Humans
  • Constructive

• As a kid, I drew cartoon characters and comic book heroes. Spiderman and the X-Men were my favorites.

  

  Kadir Nelson
  • Men
  • Character
  • Book

• In any Christian view of life, self-fulfillment must never be permitted to become the controlling issue. The issue is service, the service of real people. The question is, 'How can I be most useful?', not, 'How can I feel most useful?'

  

  D. A. Carson
  • People
  • Life
  • Real

• The more various our artificial necessities, the wider is our circle of pleasure; for all pleasure consists in obviating necessities as they rise; luxury, therefore, as it increases our wants, increases our capacity for happiness

  

  Oliver Goldsmith
  • Want
  • Luxury
  • Circles

• Silence is a source of great strenght.

  

  Lao Tzu
  • Silence
  • Source
  • Strenght

• I bear a charmed life, which must not yield To one of woman born.

  

  William Shakespeare
  • Life
  • Born
  • Bears

• I nauseate walking; 'tis a country diversion, I loathe the country.

  

  William Congreve
  • Country
  • Walking
  • Loathe

• If I refuse to allow my leg to be amputated, its mortification and my death may prove that I was wrong; but if I let the leg go, nobody can ever prove that it would not have mortified had I been obstinate. Operation is therefore the safe side for the surgeon as well as the lucrative side.

  

  George Bernard Shaw
  • Death
  • Wrong
  • Leg

• Set a page in Fournier against another in Caslon and another in Plantin and it is as if you heard three different people delivering the same discourse - each with impeccable pronunciation and clarity, yet each through the medium of a different personality.

  

  Beatrice Warde
  • Personality
  • Clarity
  • Delivering

• I really love acting, but I also really want to be a historian, so it's really confusing.

  

  Yara Shahidi
  • Acting
  • Historian
  • Confusing

• For the historian everything begins and ends with time, a mathematical, godlike time, a notion easily mocked, time external to men, 'exogenous,' as economists would say, pushing men, forcing them, and painting their own individual times the same color: it is, indeed, the imperious time of the world.

  

  Fernand Braudel
  • Time
  • World
  • Men

• Nothing is as certain as that the vices of leisure are gotten rid of by being busy.

  

  Seneca the Younger
  • Certain
  • Busy
  • Vices

• Hindsight is the historian's necessary vice.

  

  Hilary Mantel
  • Historian
  • Vices
  • Hindsight