Fernand Braudel Quotes (6 Quotes)

The fundamental reality of any civilization must be its geographical cradle. Geography dictates its vegetational growth and lays down often impassable frontiers. Civilizations are regions, zones not merely as anthropologists understand them when they talk about the zone of the two-headed ax or the feathered arrow they are areas which both confine man and undergo constant change through its efforts.

History may be divided into three movements: what moves rapidly, what moves slowly and what appears not to move at all.

Events are the ephemera of history they pass across its stage like fireflies, hardly glimpsed before they settle back into darkness and as often as not into oblivion. Every event, however brief, has to be sure a contribution to make, lights up some dark corner or even some wide vista of history. Nor it it only political history which benefits most, for every historical landscape--political, economic, social, even geographical--is illumined by the intermittent flare of the event.

Everything must be recaptured and relocated in the general framework of history, so that despite the difficulties, the fundamental paradoxes and contradictions, we may respect the unity of history which is also the unity of life.

When discussing the rise and fall of empires, it is well to mark closely their rate of growth, avoiding the temptation to telescope time and discover too early signs of greatness in a state which we know will one day be great, or to predict too early the collapse of an empire which we know will one day cease to be. The life-span of empires cannot be plotted by events, only by careful diagnosis and ausculation--and as in medicine there is always room for error.

Social science virtually abhors the event. Not without reason the short-term is the most capricious and deceptive form of time.