I love art, and I love history, but it is living art and living history that I love... It is in the interest of living art and living history that I oppose so-called restoration. What history can there be in a building bedaubed with ornament, which cannot at the best be anything but a hopeless and lifeless imitation of the hope and vigour of the earlier world?

The artist secretes nostalgia around life.

Perhaps it is with nostalgia that human beings look back in history as there is certainly a romanticisation of certain aspects of the past that erases the ugly deeds of human beings.

All history is art, because to tell a story is art, whereas to tell a true story is history: thus history is art, but a specification of art, art qualified by a condition (truth) which deprives it of a part of its character but not of all.

People regard art too highly, and history not enough

Progress' constant companion is nostalgia for the way things used to be.

One can trace the relics of this former happiness in the trim shapes of the buildings, the occasional graceful churches, and the evidences of original art and background in bits of detail here and there - a worn flight of steps, a wormy pair of decorative columns of pilasters, or a fragment of once green space with bent and rusted iron railing.

Remember, how often the great art of the past didn't look great at first, how often it didn't look like art at all; how much easier it is, decades or centuries later, to adore it, not only because it is, in fact, great but because it's still here; because the inevitable little errors and infelicities tend to recede in an object that's survived the War of 1812, the eruption of Krakatoa, the rise and fall of Nazism.

An art historical approach is too concerned with artistic genius, oeuvres, innovation and technical excellence.

Art extracts the timeless from the temporary.

The past is a work of art, free of irrelevancies and loose ends.

Nostalgia is powerful. It is natural, human, to long for the past, particularly when we can remember our histories as better than they were.

Whether in commerce, science, or politics, history remembers the artists.

I can only note that the past is beautiful because one never realises an emotion at the time. It expands later, and thus we don't have complete emotions about the present, only about the past.