Top 100 Henry Adams Quotes
#1. Morality is a private and costly luxury.
Henry Adams
#2. 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
#3. It is always good men who do the most harm in the world.
Henry Adams
#4. Absolute liberty is absence of restraint; responsibility is restraint; therefore, the ideally free individual is responsible to himself.
Henry Adams
#6. These questions of taste, of feeling, of inheritance, need no settlement. Everyone carries his own inch-rule of taste, and amuses himself by applying it, triumphantly, wherever he travels.
Henry Adams
#7. The mind resorts to reason for want of training.
Henry Adams
#8. A society in stable equilibrium is-by definition-one that has no history and wants no historians.
Henry Adams
#9. 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
#10. [Adams] supposed that, except musicians, everyone thought Beethoven a bore, as every one except mathematicians thought mathematics a bore.
Henry Adams
#11. Unity is vision; it must have been part of the process of learning to see.
Henry Adams
#12. A new friend is always a miracle, but at thirty-three years old, such a bird of paradise rising in the sage-brush was an avatar. One friend in a lifetime is much; two are many; three are hardly possible.
Henry Adams
#13. If I grapple with sin in my own strength, the devil knows he may go to sleep.
Henry Adams
#14. The study of history is useful to the historian by teaching him his ignorance of women.
Henry Adams
#15. A senator is like a begonia - showy but useless.
Henry Adams
#16. Power is poison. Its effect on Presidents had always been tragic.
Henry Adams
#17. Boys naturally look on all force as an enemy.
Henry Adams
#18. Only on the edge of the grave can man conclude anything.
Henry Adams
#19. In correct theology, the Virgin ought not to be represented in bed, for she could not suffer like ordinary women, but her palace at Chartres is not much troubled by theology, and to her, as empress-mother, the pain of child-birth was a pleasure which she wanted her people to share.
Henry Adams
#20. In Paris and London he had seen nothing to make a return to life worth while; in Washington he saw plenty of reasons for staying dead.
Henry Adams
#21. My rule in making up examination questions is to ask questions which I can't myself answer. It astounds me to see how some of my students answer questions which would play the deuce with me.
Henry Adams
#22. What one knows is, in youth, of little moment; they know enough who know how to learn.
Henry Adams
#23. Mr Jefferson meant that the American system should be a democracy, and he would rather have let the whole world perish than that this principle, which to him represented all that man was worth, should fail. Mr Hamilton considered democracy a fatal curse, and meant to stop its progress.
Henry Adams
#24. If any one of us has had an ambition higher than that of making money; a motive better than that of expediency; a faith warmer than that of reasoning; a love purer than that of the self; he has been slow to express it; still slower to urge it.
Henry Adams
#25. Energy is the inherent effort of every multiplicity to become unity.
Henry Adams
#27. No man can instruct more than half-a-dozen students at once. The whole problem of education is one of its cost in money.
Henry Adams
#28. 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
#29. The idea that any personal deity could find pleasure or profit in torturing a poor woman, by accident, with a fiendish cruelty known to man only in perverted and insane temperaments, could not be held for a moment. For pure blasphemy, it made pure atheism a comfort.
Henry Adams
#30. 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
#31. Laplace would have found it child's-play to fix a ratio of progression in mathematical science between Descartes, Leibnitz, Newton and himself
Henry Adams
#32. The habit of expression leads to the search for something to express. Something remains as a residuum of the commonplace itself, if one strikes out every commonplace in the expression.
Henry Adams
#33. 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
#34. Although the Senate is much given to admiring in its members a superiority less obvious or quite invisible to outsiders, one Senator seldom proclaims his own inferiority to another, and still more seldom likes to be told of it.
Henry Adams
#35. 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
#37. Knowledge of human nature is the beginning and end of political education.
Henry Adams
#38. As a historian, he felt it his duty to respect everything that had ever been respected, except for the occasional statesman.
Henry Adams
#39. One could not stay a month without loving the shabby town
Henry Adams
#40. 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
#41. One sought not absolute truth. One sought only a spool on which to wind the thread of history without breaking it.
Henry Adams
#42. The world is coming to an end in 1950.
Henry Adams
#43. Young men have a passion for regarding their elders as senile.
Henry Adams
#45. Power when wielded by abnormal energy is the most serious of facts.
Henry Adams
#46. Any schoolboy could see that man as a force must be measured by motion, from a fixed point.
Henry Adams
#47. 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
#48. Whenever a man reaches the top of the political ladder, his enemies unite to pull him down. His friends become critical and exacting.
Henry Adams
#49. As for America, it is the ideal fruit of all your youthful hopes and reforms. Everybody is fairly decent, respectable, domestic, bourgeois, middle-class, and tiresome. There is absolutely nothing to revile except that it's a bore.
Henry Adams
#50. There is no such thing as an underestimate of average intelligence.
Henry Adams
#51. Teachers affect eternity; no one can tell where their influence stops.
Henry Adams
#52. 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
#53. 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
#54. People here are quite struck aback at Sunday's news of the capture of New Orleans. It took them three days to make up their minds to believe it. The division of American had become an idea so fixed that they had about shut out all the avenues to the reception of any other.
Henry Adams
#55. 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
#56. I have written too much history to have faith in it; and if anyone thinks I'm wrong, I am inclined to agree with him.
Henry Adams
#57. In practice, such trifles as contradictions in principle are easily set aside; the faculty of ignoring them makes the practical man.
Henry Adams
#58. Accident counts for as much in companionship as in marriage.
Henry Adams
#59. Double standards are inspiration to men of letters, but they are apt to be fatal to politicians.
Henry Adams
#60. He too serves a certain purpose who only stands and cheers.
Henry Adams
#62. A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops.
Henry Adams
#63. 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
#64. One does every day and without a second thought, what at another time would be the event of a year, perhaps of a life.
Henry Adams
#65. Every mane should have a fair sized cemetery in which to bury the faults of his friend.
Henry Adams
#66. No man likes to have his intelligence or good faith questioned, especially if he has doubts about it himself.
Henry Adams
#67. 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
#68. From earliest childhood the boy was accustomed to feel that, for him, life was double. Winter and summer, town and country, law and liberty, were hostile, and the man who pretended they were not, was in his eyes a schoolmaster
that is, a man employed to tell lies to little boys.
Henry Adams
#69. 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
#70. Susceptibility to the highest forces is the highest genius.
Henry Adams
#71. The effect of power and publicity on all men is the aggravation of self, a sort of tumor that ends by killing the victim's sympathies.
Henry Adams
#72. The American President resembles the commander of a ship at sea. He must have a helm to grasp, a course to steer, a port to seek.
Henry Adams
#74. 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
#75. The woman who is known only through a man is known wrong.
Henry Adams
#76. History is the most aristocratic of all literary pursuits, because it obliges the historian to be rich as well as educated.
Henry Adams
#77. By nature, man is lazy, working only under compulsion; and when he is strong we will always live, as far as he can, upon the labor or the property of the weak.
Henry Adams
#78. The less a tourist knows, the fewer mistakes he need make, for he will not expect himself to explain ignorance.
Henry Adams
#79. The Jewish question is really the most serious of our problems.
Henry Adams
#81. The work of internal government has become the task of controlling the thousands of fifth-rate men.
Henry Adams
#82. 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
#83. As History stands, it is a sort of Chinese Play, without end and without lesson.
Henry Adams
#84. Chaos was the law of nature; Order was the dream of man.
Henry Adams
#85. That the American, by temperament, worked to excess, was true; work and whiskey were his stimulants; work was a form of vice; but he never cared much for money or power after he earned them.
Henry Adams
#86. We combat obstacles in order to get repose, and when got, the repose is insupportable.
Henry Adams
#87. In the history of the United States, there is no continuity at all. You can cut through it anywhere and nothing on this side of the cut has anything to do with anything on the other side.
Henry Adams
#88. I hate photographs abstractly, because they have given me more ideas perversely and immovably wrong, than I ever should get by imagination.
Henry Adams
#89. Life is a narrow valley, and the roads run close together
Henry Adams
#90. The progress of evolution from President Washington to President Grant was alone evidence to upset Darwin.
Henry Adams
#91. Politics is simply the organization of hatreds.
Henry Adams
#92. The photograph is a coarse fraud, and seems to delight only in taking the whole beauty out of the picture.
Henry Adams
#93. All experience is an arch, to build upon.
Henry Adams
#94. Chaos often breeds life, when order breeds habit.
Henry Adams
#96. The Virgin filled so enormous a space in the life and thought of the time that one stands now helpless before the mass of testimony to her direct action and constant presence in every moment and form of the illusion which men thought they thought their existence.
Henry Adams
#97. Henry James chews more than he bites off.
Henry Adams
#98. The great word Evolution had not yet, in 1860, made a new religion of history, but the old religion had preached the same doctrinefor a thousand years without finding in the entire history of Rome anything but flat contradiction.
Henry Adams
#99. The chief wonder of education is that it does not ruin everybody concerned in it, teachers and taught.
Henry Adams
#100. Nothing in education is so astonishing as the amount of ignorance it accumulates in the form of inert facts.
Henry Adams
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