Henry Adams Quotes

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Quotes About Henry Adams

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There have been times when the church seemed afraid, but she is no longer. Analyze, dissect, use your microscope or your spectrum till the last atom of matter is reached; reflect and refine till the last element of thought is made clear; the church now knows with the certainty of science what she once knew only by the certainty of faith, that you will find enthroned behind all thought and matter only one central idea
that idea which the church has never ceased to embody
I AM! ~ Henry Adams
Henry Adams quotes by Henry Adams
For the first time in his life, Mont Blanc for a moment looked to him what it was - a chaos of anarchic and purposeless forces - and he needed days of repose to see it clothe itself again with the illusions of his senses, the white purity of its snows, the splendor of its light, and the infinity of its heavenly peace. Nature was kind; Lake Geneva was beautiful beyond itself, and the Alps put on charms real as terrors. ~ Henry Adams
Henry Adams quotes by Henry Adams
My own conclusion is that history is simply social development along the lines of weakest resistance, and that in most cases the line of weakest resistance is found as unconsciously by society as by water. ~ Henry Adams
Henry Adams quotes by Henry Adams
So Henry Adams, well aware that he could not succeed as a scholar, and finding his social position beyond improvement or need of effort, betook himself to the single ambition which otherwise would scarcely have seemed a true outcome of the college, though it was the last remnant of the old Unitarian supremacy. He took to the pen. He wrote. ~ Henry Adams
Henry Adams quotes by Henry Adams
[After viewing the Palace of Electricity at the 1900 Trocadero Exposition in Paris]
[Saint-Gaudens and Matthew Arnold] felt a railway train as power; yet they, and all other artists, constantly complained that the power embodied in a railway train could never be embodied in art. All the steam in the world could not, like the Virgin, build Chartres. ~ Henry Adams
Henry Adams quotes by Henry Adams
My favorite figure of the American author is that of a man who breeds a favorite dog, which he throws into the Mississippi River for the pleasure of making a splash. The river does not splash, but it drowns the dog. ~ Henry Adams
Henry Adams quotes by Henry Adams
The philosopher says
I am, and the church scouts his philosophy. She answers:
No! you are NOT, you have no existence of your own. You were and are and ever will be only a part of the supreme I AM, of which the church is the emblem. ~ Henry Adams
Henry Adams quotes by Henry Adams
He too serves a certain purpose who only stands and cheers. ~ Henry Adams
Henry Adams quotes by Henry Adams
Chaos often breeds life, when order breeds habit. ~ Henry Adams
Henry Adams quotes by Henry Adams
Every one who marries goes it blind, more or less. ~ Henry Adams
Henry Adams quotes by Henry Adams
Every man who has at last succeeded, after long effort, in calling up the divinity which lies hidden in a woman's heart, is startled to find that he must obey the God he summoned. ~ Henry Adams
Henry Adams quotes by Henry Adams
Man had in the beginning no power of analysis or synthesis approaching that of the spider, or even of the honey-bee; he had acute sensibility to the higher forces. Fire taught him secrets that no other animal could learn; running water probably taught him even more, especially in his first lessons of mechanics; the animals helped to educate him, trusting themselves into his hands merely for the sake of their food, and carrying his burdens or supplying his clothing; the grasses and grains were academies of study. ~ Henry Adams
Henry Adams quotes by Henry Adams
On May 13, he met the official announcement that England recognized the belligerency of the Confederacy. This beginning of a new education tore up by the roots nearly all that was left of Harvard College and Germany. He had to learn - the sooner the better - that his ideas were the reverse of truth; that in May, 1861, no one in England - literally no one - doubted that Jefferson Davis had made or would make a nation, and nearly all were glad of it, though not often saying so. They mostly imitated Palmerston who, according to Mr. Gladstone, "desired the severance as a diminution of a dangerous power, but prudently held his tongue." The sentiment of anti-slavery had disappeared. ~ Henry Adams
Henry Adams quotes by Henry Adams
History is only a value of relation. ~ Henry Adams
Henry Adams quotes by Henry Adams
The common view of marriage as a primitive institution implies in the man more than arbitrary superiority, such as he exercised over the child, which still remained free. The woman's slavery was assumed to be for life. ~ Henry Adams
Henry Adams quotes by Henry Adams
Life is a narrow valley, and the roads run close together ~ Henry Adams
Henry Adams quotes by Henry Adams
I, too, like yourself was a good party man: my party was that of the Church; I was ultramontane. Your party system is one of your thefts from our Church; your National Convention is our Ecunemic Council; you abdicate reason, as we do, before its decisions; and you yourself Mr. Ratcliffe, you are a Cardinal. ~ Henry Adams
Henry Adams quotes by Henry Adams
No man, however strong, can serve ten years as schoolmaster, priest, or Senator, and remain fit for anything else. ~ Henry Adams
Henry Adams quotes by Henry Adams
No man means all he says, and yet very few say all they mean, for words are slippery and thought is viscous. ~ Henry Adams
Henry Adams quotes by Henry Adams
The difference is slight, to the influence of an author, whether he is read by five hundred readers, or by five hundred thousand; if he can select the five hundred, he reaches the five hundred thousand. ~ Henry Adams
Henry Adams quotes by Henry Adams
The photograph is a coarse fraud, and seems to delight only in taking the whole beauty out of the picture. ~ Henry Adams
Henry Adams quotes by Henry Adams
The Woman had once been supreme; in France she still seemed potent, not merely as a sentiment but as a force; why was she unknownin America? for evidently America was ashamed of her, and she was ashamed of herself, otherwise they would not have strewn fig-leaves so profusely all over her. When she was a true force, she was ignorant of fig-leaves, but the monthly-magazine-made American female had not a feature that would have been recognized by Adam. The trait was notorious, and often humorous, but anyone brought up among Puritans knew that sex was sin. In any previous age, sex was strength. ~ Henry Adams
Henry Adams quotes by Henry Adams
The new American, like the new European, was the servant of the powerhouse, as the European of the twelfth century was the servant of the Church. ~ Henry Adams
Henry Adams quotes by Henry Adams
You say that love is nonsense ... I tell you it is no such thing. For weeks and months it is a steady physical pain, an ache about the heart, never leaving one, by night or by day; a long strain on one's nerves like toothache or rheumatism, not intolerable at any one instant, but exhausting by its steady drain on the strength. ~ Henry Adams
Henry Adams quotes by Henry Adams
The People of Virginia declare and make known that the powers granted under the Constitution being derived from the People of the United States may be resumed by them whensoever the same shall be perverted to their injury or oppression and that every. ~ Henry Adams
Henry Adams quotes by Henry Adams
An artist's business is only to see. ~ Henry Adams
Henry Adams quotes by Henry Adams
Wild as man was, and disgusting as the more degraded tribes and communities were, the best of them, and all those from which further advance came, were marked by good qualities, or they could never have risen to a higher stage. ~ Henry Adams
Henry Adams quotes by Henry Adams
In Henry Adams, I discovered not only the prototype of the modern thinker but also someone who is more interesting: a viper-toothed, puling, supercilious crank, thwarted in ambition, aging gracelessly, mad at the cosmos, and ashamed of his own jejune ideals. He is nevertheless very dear to me. ~ P. J. O'Rourke
Henry Adams quotes by P. J. O'Rourke
Probably the institution of marriage had its origin in love of property. Both men and women were united in this
that whatever they loved best, they wished to possess. The usual theory holds that the communal system would not permit the gratification of this desire at the expense of communal rights, and that therefore men were driven to gratify their passion by purchasing or by capturing women from neighboring and hostile tribes. ~ Henry Adams
Henry Adams quotes by Henry Adams
History is the most aristocratic of all literary pursuits, because it obliges the historian to be rich as well as educated. ~ Henry Adams
Henry Adams quotes by Henry Adams
The outline of the city became frantic in its effort to explain something that defied meaning. Power seemed to have outgrown its servitude and to have asserted its freedom. The cylinder had exploded, and thrown great masses of stone and steam against the sky. ~ Henry Adams
Henry Adams quotes by Henry Adams
You can't use tact with a Congressman! A Congressman is a hog! You must take a stick and hit him on the snout! ~ Henry Adams
Henry Adams quotes by Henry Adams
The mind resorts to reason for want of training. ~ Henry Adams
Henry Adams quotes by Henry Adams
Silence alone is respectable and respected. I believe God to be silence. ~ Henry Adams
Henry Adams quotes by Henry Adams
Throughout human history the waste of mind has been appalling, and, as this story is meant to show, society has conspired to promote it. No doubt the teacher is the worst criminal, but the world stands behind him and drags the student from his course. ~ Henry Adams
Henry Adams quotes by Henry Adams
The world is coming to an end in 1950. ~ Henry Adams
Henry Adams quotes by Henry Adams
The habit of doubt; of distrusting his own judgment and of totally rejecting the judgment of the world; the tendency to regard every question as open; the hesitation to act except as a choice of evils; the shirking of responsibility; the love of line, form, quality; the horror of ennui; the passion for companionship and the antipathy to society
all these are well-known qualities of New England character in no way peculiar to individuals but in this instance they seemed to be stimulated by the fever, and Henry Adams could never make up his mind whether, on the whole, the change of character was morbid or healthy, good or bad for his purpose. ~ Henry Adams
Henry Adams quotes by Henry Adams
But as we all know, rock 'n' roll will never die, and education too, as Henry Adams always sez, keeps going on forever. ~ Thomas Pynchon
Henry Adams quotes by Thomas Pynchon
History is only a catalogue of the forgotten. ~ Henry Adams
Henry Adams quotes by Henry Adams
All State education is a sort of dynamo machine for polarizing the popular mind; for turning and holding its lines of force in the direction supposed to be most effective for State purposes. ~ Henry Adams
Henry Adams quotes by Henry Adams
Of all studies, the one he would rather have avoided was that of his own mind. He knew no tragedy so heartrending as introspection. ~ Henry Adams
Henry Adams quotes by Henry Adams
If our minds could get hold of one abstract truth, they would be immortal so far as that truth is concerned. My trouble is to find out how we can get hold of the truth at all. ~ Henry Adams
Henry Adams quotes by Henry Adams
Charles Sumner's mind had reached the calm of WATER which receives and reflects images without absorbing them; it contains nothing but itself. ~ Henry Adams
Henry Adams quotes by Henry Adams
If it were worth while to argue a paradox, one might maintain that nature regards the female as the essential, the male as the superfluity of her world. Perhaps the best starting-point for study of the Virgin would be a practical acquaintance with bees, and especially with queen bees. ~ Henry Adams
Henry Adams quotes by Henry Adams
One could not stay a month without loving the shabby town ~ Henry Adams
Henry Adams quotes by Henry Adams
After Gibbs, one the most distinguished [American scientists] was Langley, of the Smithsonian ... He had the physicist's heinous fault of professing to know nothing between flashes of intense perception ... Rigidly denying himself the amusement of philosophy, which consists chiefly in suggesting unintelligible answers to insoluble problems, and liked to wander past them in a courteous temper, even bowing to them distantly as though recognizing their existence, while doubting their respectibility. ~ Henry Adams
Henry Adams quotes by Henry Adams
Charles Francis Adams was singular for mental poise - absence of self-assertion or self-consciousness - the faculty of standing apart without seeming aware that he was alone - a balance of mind and temper that neither challenged nor avoided notice, nor admitted question of superiority or inferiority, of jealousy, of personal motives, from any source, even under great pressure. ~ Henry Adams
Henry Adams quotes by Henry Adams
The first serious consciousness of Nature's gesture - her attitude towards life-took form then as a phantasm, a nightmare, all insanity of force. For the first time, the stage-scenery of the senses collapsed; the human mind felt itself stripped naked, vibrating in a void of shapeless energies, with resistless mass, colliding, crushing, wasting, and destroying what these same energies had created and labored from eternity to perfect. ~ Henry Adams
Henry Adams quotes by Henry Adams
No man likes to have his intelligence or good faith questioned, especially if he has doubts about it himself. ~ Henry Adams
Henry Adams quotes by Henry Adams
The press is the hired agent of a monied system, and set up for no other purpose than to tell lies where their interests are involved. One can trust nobody and nothing. ~ Henry Adams
Henry Adams quotes by Henry Adams
At the utmost, the active-minded young man should ask of his teacher only mastery of his tools. The young man himself, the subject of education, is a certain form of energy; the object to be gained is economy of his force; the training is partly the clearing away of obstacles, partly the direct application of effort. Once acquired, the tools and models may be thrown away. ~ Henry Adams
Henry Adams quotes by Henry Adams
Henry Adams observes that John Hay has the ability to take the world as a whole rather than pulling it to pieces in criticism. He also observes that, in the routine of a stressful job, this perspective is challenged ~ John Taliaferro
Henry Adams quotes by John Taliaferro
I want to be advertised and the easiest way is to do something obnoxious and do it well. ~ Henry Adams
Henry Adams quotes by Henry Adams
Nothing in education is so astonishing as the amount of ignorance it accumulates in the form of inert facts. ~ Henry Adams
Henry Adams quotes by Henry Adams
All experience is an arch, to build upon. ~ Henry Adams
Henry Adams quotes by Henry Adams
History is a tangled skein that one may take up at any point, and break when one has unravelled enough. ~ Henry Adams
Henry Adams quotes by Henry Adams
Henry James chews more than he bites off. ~ Henry Adams
Henry Adams quotes by Henry Adams
The Indian Summer of life should be a little sunny and a little sad, like the season, and infinite in wealth and depth of tone, but never hustled. ~ Henry Adams
Henry Adams quotes by Henry Adams
The historian must not try to know what is truth, if he values his honesty; for if he cares for his truths, he is certain to falsify his facts. ~ Henry Adams
Henry Adams quotes by Henry Adams
We shall some day catch an abstract truth by the tail, and then we shall have our religion and our immortality. ~ Henry Adams
Henry Adams quotes by Henry Adams
Since his time, and largely thanks to him, the Ego has steadily tended to efface itself, and, for purposes of model, to become a manikin on which the toilet of education is to be draped in order to show the fit or misfit of the clothes. The object of study is the garment, not the figure. The tailor adapts the manikin as well as the clothes to his patron's wants. The tailor's object, in this volume, is to fit young men, in universities or elsewhere, to be men of the world, equipped for any emergency ; and the garment offered to them is meant to show the faults of the patchwork fitted on their fathers. ~ Henry Adams
Henry Adams quotes by Henry Adams
American society is a sort of flat, fresh-water pond which absorbs silently, without reaction, anything which is thrown into it. ~ Henry Adams
Henry Adams quotes by Henry Adams
I am fairly tired
bored beyond endurance
by the world we live in, and its ideals, and am ready to say so, not violently, but kindly, as one rubs salt into the back of a flogged sailor as though one loved him. ~ Henry Adams
Henry Adams quotes by Henry Adams
A friend in power is a friend lost. ~ Henry Adams
Henry Adams quotes by Henry Adams
A society in stable equilibrium is-by definition-one that has no history and wants no historians. ~ Henry Adams
Henry Adams quotes by Henry Adams
It is impossible to underrate human intelligence - beginning with one's own. ~ Henry Adams
Henry Adams quotes by Henry Adams
What one knows is, in youth, of little moment; they know enough who know how to learn. ~ Henry Adams
Henry Adams quotes by Henry Adams
Evolution under uniform conditions pleased every one
except curates and bishops; it was the very best substitute for religion; a safe, conservative, practical, thoroughly Common-Law deity. ~ Henry Adams
Henry Adams quotes by Henry Adams
The best date movies give you something to talk about. A movie that's a downer is a great way to find out about someone. ~ Henry Adams
Henry Adams quotes by Henry Adams
I am not prepared to deny or assert any proposition which concerns myself; but certainly this solitary struggle with platitudinous atoms, called men and women by courtesy, leads me to wish for my wife again. How did I ever hit on the only woman in the world who fits my cravings and never sounds hollow anywhere? Social chemistry-the mutual attraction of equivalent human molecules-is a science yet to be created, for the fact is my daily study and only satisfaction in life. ~ Henry Adams
Henry Adams quotes by Henry Adams
During an election campaign the air is full of speeches and vice versa. ~ Henry Adams
Henry Adams quotes by Henry Adams
Morality is a private and costly luxury. ~ Henry Adams
Henry Adams quotes by Henry Adams
There is no such thing as an underestimate of average intelligence. ~ Henry Adams
Henry Adams quotes by Henry Adams
Every mane should have a fair sized cemetery in which to bury the faults of his friend. ~ Henry Adams
Henry Adams quotes by Henry Adams
Unity is vision; it must have been part of the process of learning to see. ~ Henry Adams
Henry Adams quotes by Henry Adams
Society is immoral and immortal; it can afford to commit any kind of folly, and indulge in any sort of vice; it cannot be killed, and the fragments that survive can always laugh at the dead. ~ Henry Adams
Henry Adams quotes by Henry Adams
A congressman is a pig. The only way to get his snout from the trough is to rap it sharply with a stick. ~ Henry Adams
Henry Adams quotes by Henry Adams
Women have, commonly, a very positive moral sense; that which they will, is right; that which they reject, is wrong; and their will, in most cases, ends by settling the moral. ~ Henry Adams
Henry Adams quotes by Henry Adams
The world can absorb only doses of truth," he said; "too much would kill it." One sought education in order to adjust the dose. ~ Henry Adams
Henry Adams quotes by Henry Adams
Church and State, Soul and Body, God and Man, are all one at Mont Saint Michel, and the business of all is to fight, each in his own way, or to stand guard for each other. ~ Henry Adams
Henry Adams quotes by Henry Adams
American politics is a struggle, not of men but of forces. The men become every year more and more creatures of force, massed about central power houses. ~ Henry Adams
Henry Adams quotes by Henry Adams
Artists ... disappeared long ago as social forces. So did the church. ~ Henry Adams
Henry Adams quotes by Henry Adams
If Washington were President now, he would have to learn our ways or lose his next election. Only fools and theorists imagine that our society can be handled with gloves or long poles. One must make one's self a part of it. If virtue won't answer our purpose, we must use vice, or our opponents will put us out of office, and this was as true in Washington's day as it is now, and always will be. ~ Henry Adams
Henry Adams quotes by Henry Adams
I think [Robert E.] Lee should have been hanged. It was all the worse that he was a good man, had a good character, and acted conscientiously. It's always the good men who do the most harm. ~ Henry Adams
Henry Adams quotes by Henry Adams
The spider-mind acquires a faculty of memory, and, with it, a singular skill of analysis and synthesis, taking apart and putting together in different relations the meshes of its trap. Man had in the beginning no power of analysis or synthesis approaching that of the spider, or even of the honey-bee; but he had acute sensibility to the higher forces. ~ Henry Adams
Henry Adams quotes by Henry Adams
If I grapple with sin in my own strength, the devil knows he may go to sleep. ~ Henry Adams
Henry Adams quotes by Henry Adams
For generation after generation, Adamses and Brookses and Boylstons and Gorhams had gone to Harvard College, and although none of them, as far as known had ever done any good there, or thought himself the better for it, custom, social ties, convenience, and, above all, economy, kept each generation in the track. Any other education would have required a serious effort, but no one took Harvard College seriously. All went there because their friends went there, and the College was their ideal of social self-respect.

Harvard College, as far as it educated all, was a mild and liberal school, which sent young men into the world with all they needed to make respectable citizens, and something of what they wanted to make useful ones. Leaders of men it never tried to make. ~ Henry Adams
Henry Adams quotes by Henry Adams
Average human nature is very coarse, and its ideals must necessarily be average. The world never loved perfect poise. What the world does love is commonly absence of poise, for it has to be amused. ~ Henry Adams
Henry Adams quotes by Henry Adams
We combat obstacles in order to get repose, and when got, the repose is insupportable. ~ Henry Adams
Henry Adams quotes by Henry Adams
My belief is that science is to wreck us, and that we are like monkeys monkeying with a loaded shell; we don't in the least know or care where our practically infinite energies come from or will bring us to. ~ Henry Adams
Henry Adams quotes by Henry Adams
As for piracy, I love to be pirated. It is the greatest compliment an author can have. The wholesale piracy of Democracy was the single real triumph of my life. Anyone may steal what he likes from me. ~ Henry Adams
Henry Adams quotes by Henry Adams
Modern politics is, at bottom, a struggle not of men but of forces. The men become every year more and more creatures of force, massed about central powerhouses. The conflict is no longer between the men, but between the motors that drive the men, and the men tend to succumb to their own motive forces. ~ Henry Adams
Henry Adams quotes by Henry Adams
Seward would inspire a cow with statesmanship if she understood our language. ~ Henry Adams
Henry Adams quotes by Henry Adams
Against them make ready your strength to the utmost of your power, including steeds of war, to strike terror into (the hearts of) the enemies, of Allah and your enemies, and others besides, whom ye may not know, but whom Allah doth know ~ Henry Adams
Henry Adams quotes by Henry Adams
He betrayed the consciousness that he and his people had a past, if they dared but avow it, and might have a future, if they could but divine it. ~ Henry Adams
Henry Adams quotes by Henry Adams
Politics cannot stop to study psychology Its methods are rough; its judgments rougher still. ~ Henry Adams
Henry Adams quotes by Henry Adams
The habit of looking at life as a social relation - an affair of society - did no good. It cultivated a weakness which needed no cultivation. If it had helped to make men of the world, or give the manners and instincts of any profession - such as temper, patience, courtesy, or a faculty of profiting by the social defects of opponents - it would have been education better worth having than mathematics or languages; but so far as it helped to make anything, it helped only to make the college standard permanent through life. ~ Henry Adams
Henry Adams quotes by Henry Adams
Susceptibility to the highest forces is the highest genius. ~ Henry Adams
Henry Adams quotes by Henry Adams
Any schoolboy could see that man as a force must be measured by motion, from a fixed point. ~ Henry Adams
Henry Adams quotes by Henry Adams
I am an anarchist in politics and an impressionist in art as well as a symbolist in literature. Not that I understand what these terms mean, but I take them to be all merely synonyms of pessimist. ~ Henry Adams
Henry Adams quotes by Henry Adams
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