[History is] petrified imagination.

The phrase suggests that what we call “history” is not a transparent record of the past but an imaginative reconstruction that has hardened into accepted narrative. “Imagination” points to the interpretive work involved in selecting facts, arranging them into causal stories, and supplying motives and coherence; “petrified” implies this once-fluid interpretive act becomes fixed—canonized in textbooks, monuments, and collective memory—so it can appear objective and inevitable. The bracketed “[History is]” also hints the line may be extracted from a longer remark, reinforcing the idea that historical meaning often depends on framing. As a maxim, it cautions readers to treat historical accounts as shaped artifacts rather than neutral mirrors of events.