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"Too rigid specialization is almost as bad for a historian's mind, and for his ultimate reputation, as too early an indulgence in broad generalization and synthesis."
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"I cannot squeeze the stars, but I can squeeze my mind to feel the moon compressed."
"He didn't know if that was really true or not, but he discovered something which was tremendously liberating: he didn't care. He was very tired of thinking and thinking and still not knowing. He was also tired of being frightened, like a man who has entered a cave on a lark and now begins to suspect he is lost. Stop thinking about it, then. That's the solution."
"The thoughts that occur to me while I'm running are like clouds in the sky. Clouds of all different sizes. They come and they go, while the sky remains the same sky always. The clouds are mere guests in the sky that pass away and vanish, leaving behind the sky."
"Thought for the day: we have far too many of them. And we prize them too highly; more so than we do the power of silence, mindfulness and pure kindness."
"The mind that is collectively orientated is quite incapable of thinking and feeling in any other way than by projection."
"Interest speaks all sorts of tongues and plays all sorts of parts even that of disinterestedness."
Explore more quotes by Samuel E. Morison
"Courses on historical methodology are not worth the time that they take up. I shall never give one myself, and I have observed that many of my colleagues who do give such courses refrain from exemplifying their methods by writing anything."
"Historical methodology, as I see it, is a product of common sense applied to circumstances."
"Yet enthusiasm is no excuse for the historian going off balance. He should remind the reader that outcomes were neither inevitable nor foreordained, but subject to a thousand changes and chances."
"Skepticism is an important historical tool. It is the starting point of all revision of hitherto accepted history."
"The same contingencies of time and space that force a statesman or soldier to make decisions, impel the historian, though with less urgency, to make up his mind."
"Any child knows that history can only be a reduced representation of reality, but it must be a true one, not distorted by queer lenses."
"With honesty of purpose, balance, a respect for tradition, courage, and, above all, a philosophy of life, any young person who embraces the historical profession will find it rich in rewards and durable in satisfaction."
"So I have cultivated the vast garden of human experience which is history, without troubling myself overmuch about laws, essential first causes, or how it is all coming out."
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