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"It is the business and duty of historians to be exact, truthful, and wholly free from passion. Neither interest nor fear, hatred nor love, should make them swerve from the path of truth, whose mother is history, rival of time, storehouse of deeds, witness for the past, example and counsel for the present, and warning for the future."
     – narrator, from Don Quixote, by Miguel de Cervantes (68)

"No story can be bad so long as it is true."
     – narrator, from Don Quixote, by Miguel de Cervantes (66)

"There is no story that is not true. The world has no end, and what is good among one people is an abomination with others."
     – Uchendu, from Things Fall Apart, by Chinua Achebe (141)

"If one doesn't talk about a thing, it has never happened."
     – Dorian Gray to Basil Hallward, from The Picture of Dorian Gray, by Oscar Wilde (88)

"Yet one had ancestors in literature, as well as in one's own race, nearer perhaps in type and temperament, many of them, and certainly with an influence of which one was more absolutely conscious. There were times when it appeared to Dorian Gray that the whole of history was merely the record of his own life, not as he had lived it in act and circumstance, but as his imagination had created it for him, as it had been in his brain and in his passions. He felt that he had known them all, those strange terrible figures that had passed across the stage of the world and made sin so marvellous and evil so full of subtlety. It seemed to him that in some mysterious way their lives had been his own."
     – narrator, from The Picture of Dorian Gray, by Oscar Wilde (118)

"I sometimes think, Harry, that there are only two eras of any importance in the world's history. The first is the appearance of a new medium for art, and the second is the appearance of a new personality for art also."
     – Basil Hallward to Lord Henry, from The Picture of Dorian Gray, by Oscar Wilde (8)

"'To know any thing, returned the poet, we must know its effects; to see men we must see their works, that we may learn what reason has dictated, or passion has incited, and find what are the most powerful motives of action. To judge rightly of the present we must oppose it to the past; for all judgment is comparative, and of the future nothing can be known. The truth is, that no mind is much employed upon the present: recollection and anticipation fill up almost all our moments. Our passions are joy and grief, love and hatred, hope and fear. Of joy and grief the past is the object, and the future of hope and fear; even love and hatred respect the past, for the cause must have been before the effect.
'The present state of things is the consequence of the former, and it is natural to inquire what were the sources of the good that we enjoy, or of the evil that we suffer. If we act only for ourselves, to neglect the study of history is not prudent: if we are entrusted with the care of others, it is not just. Ignorance, when it is voluntary, is criminal; and he may properly be charged with evil who refused to learn how he might prevent it."
     – Imlac to Rasselas and Nekayah, from The History of Rasselas: Prince of Abissinia, by Samuel Johnson