What do you take out of this quote?

It sounds kind of confusing to me, but what I think about this quote is that history and knowledge can be boring and not interesting, but yes, we do need to appreciate them. History is coming by day and night, and it is what has made us today. We can't accuse the past and forget about it just because it's "all ancient history now." It's their offerings of (like you said) life lessons that we should learn from.