Great Throughts Treasury

This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.

Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges

French Historian

"History studies not just facts and institutions, its real subject is the human spirit."

"Greece and Rome appear to us in a character absolutely inimitable; nothing in modern times resembles them; nothing in the future can resemble them."

"What tradition can remain to us of those generations that have not left us a single written line? … Fortunately, the past never completely dies for man. Man may forget it, but he always preserves it within him. For, take him at any epoch, and he is the product, the epitome, of all the earlier epochs. Let him look into his own soul, and he can find and distinguish these different epochs by what each of them has left behind."

"The cause which produces them must be powerful, and must be found in man himself. If the laws of human association are no longer the same as in antiquity, it is because there has been a change in man."

"Children born of the union of a citizen with a foreign bastards were famous."

"Generations pass, nations dissolve: the language is."

"After a long compression democracy should not stop at political reform."

"All that was sacred gave rise to a party."

"Given the wealth the most common sentiment is not respect, it is envy."

"Hitherto men had understood the authority as an appendage of the priesthood."

"Lying is always trying to imitate the truth."

"Solon therefore gave the people civil and not political rights."

"The ancient family is a religious association an association more likely."

"The man may conquer nature, but it is subject to his thought."

"The money appeared. Yet the emergence of money was a great revolution."

"The story is not an art. It is a pure science."

"These records were religiously deposited facts as they occurred."

"This fire was something divine, we loved, we made ??him a cult."

"When you're winning so easily, it is drunk with victory."

"Zeno teaches man that has a dignity, not a citizen, but as a man."

"The Greeks have never managed to reconcile civil equality with political inequality."

"The Merovingian regime is an absolute monarchy tempered by assassination."

"There was nothing that was closest to his heart to a city that the memory of its foundation."