For Baron Pierre de Coubertin, the past was always present.  From the time he was a student of the Jesuits studying the classical world of the ancients, he had an exquisite sense of history.  Like so many of us, he believed it was essential for the modern world to understand contemporary life in the context of everything that preceded it.  After he retired from the Olympic Movement in 1925, one of his first projects was the completion of his four-volume Universal History, which was published between 1926 and 1927.  In a lecture he gave at the Academy of Athens in 1927, he addressed the importance of approaching history in the correct frame of mind—almost as an athlete would approach sport.  His lecture was titled, On the Transformation and Spread of Historical Studies: Their Character and Consequences.  Here’s the passage from which today’s quote is taken.

“World history has not become easy to assimilate merely because it has become possible to write. The right setting must still be created for it. In ourselves, we must create a state of mind that makes us capable of grasping its true proportions, of enjoying it, and of sticking with it. Proportion, balance, and measure are the basic needs of our nervous age. These are incomparable qualities.”