Morgan Hexner

“Historical consciousness therefore leaves you, as does maturity itself, with a simultaneous sense of your own significance and insignificance. Like Friedrich's wanderer, you dominate a landscape even as you're diminished by it. You're suspended between sensibilities that are at odds with one another, but it's precisely within that suspension that your own identity--whether as a person or a historian--tends to reside. Self-doubt must always precede self-confidence. It should never, however, cease to accompany, challenge, and by these means discipline self-confidence.”
― John Lewis Gaddis, The Landscape of History: How Historians Map the Past

“I expressed skepticism, in the first chapter, about the utility of time machines in historical research. I especially advised against graduate students relying on them, because of the limited perspective you tend to get from being plunked down in some particular part of the past, and the danger of not getting back in time for your orals.”
― John Lewis Gaddis, The Landscape of History: How Historians Map the Past

“It's freezing up here. What did you use to keep warm?"
"Indignation," said Michelangelo. "Best fuel I know. Never burns out.”
― Irving Stone, The Agony and the Ecstasy

“One should not become an artist because he can, but because he must. It is only for those who would be miserable without it.”
― Irving Stone, The Agony and the Ecstasy