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"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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Exlpore more Experience quotes
"Poetry is innocent, not wise. It does not learn from experience, because each poetic experience is unique."
"I just came into my own sexuality at thirty. I don't think it's something you can deeply experience at 18 or any time before that."
"It was like making a blunder at a party; there was nothing to do about it, it was dreadfully mortifying, but it showed a lack of sense to ascribe too much importance to it."
"Through this experience we have been warned - learn everything, don't forget anything!"
"Failure is only an experience. Experience is the foundation of any success."
"We are all the sum of a million moments in our lives."
"Common experience is the gold reserve which confers an exchange value on the currency which words are; without this reserve of shared experiences, all our pronouncements are checks drawn on insufficient funds."
"Reality spilled out into the alley like water from an overfilled bowl - as sound, as smell, as image, as plea, as response."
"I do have to travel a lot for speaking engagements."
"All growth is a leap in the dark, a spontaneous unpremeditated act without benefit of experience."
Explore more quotes by Samuel E. Morison
"In any case, his judgment and set of values, acting alone or through his assistants, determine not only what is gold and what is dross but the design of the history which he creates out of the metal. The historian decides what is significant, and what is not."
"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."
"Historical methodology, as I see it, is a product of common sense applied to circumstances."
"Skepticism is an important historical tool. It is the starting point of all revision of hitherto accepted history."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
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