Top 100 Henry Adams Quotes
#1. My natural pessimism now works on Hay's natural pessimism until we are both quite out of our minds." Henry Adams
John Taliaferro
#2. Henry Adams was scared shitless, politically, by the discovery that England isn't alien to a boy from Boston, but it was true, and it is true. It's a Boston and coastal Massachusetts thing. Henry Adams blocked it out.
William Monahan
#4. 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
#5. 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
#6. 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
#7. I cannot remember when I was not fascinated by Henry Adams.
Gore Vidal
#8. In Boston terms I was everyone and no one, with no social investment, no social insecurity, sort of Imitation of Christ in one hand and The Education of Henry Adams in the other, and because I was part of nothing I could observe everything without having anything personal invested in the findings.
William Monahan
#9. I would rather starve and rot and keep the privilege of speaking the truth as I see it, than of holding all the offices that capital has to give from the presidency down.
Henry Adams
#10. Morality is a private and costly luxury.
Henry Adams
#11. To her mind the Senate was a place where people went to recite speeches, and she naively assumed that the speeches were useful and had a purpose, but as they did not interest her she never went again. This is a very common conception of Congress; many Congressmen share it.
Henry Adams
#12. He never labored so hard to learn a language as he did to hold his tongue, and it affected him for life. The habit of reticence - of talking without meaning - is never effaced.
Henry Adams
#13. 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
#14. 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
#15. 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
#16. No man, however strong, can serve ten years as schoolmaster, priest, or Senator, and remain fit for anything else.
Henry Adams
#17. 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
#18. It is always good men who do the most harm in the world.
Henry Adams
#19. Absolute liberty is absence of restraint; responsibility is restraint; therefore, the ideally free individual is responsible to himself.
Henry Adams
#20. Politics are a very unsatisfactory game.
Henry Adams
#21. Every syllable that can be struck out is pure profit, and every page that can be economised is a five-per-cent dividend. Nature rebels against this rule; the flesh is weak, and shrinks from the scissors; I groan in retrospect over the weak.
Henry Adams
#22. Quite naturally, the men who led in stirring up the revolt against Great Britain and in keeping the fighting temper of the Revolutionists at the proper heat were the boldest and most radical thinkers - men like Samuel Adams, Thomas Paine, Patrick Henry, and Thomas Jefferson.
Charles A. Beard
#24. 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
#25. The mind resorts to reason for want of training.
Henry Adams
#26. A society in stable equilibrium is-by definition-one that has no history and wants no historians.
Henry Adams
#27. Simplicity is the most deceitful mistress that ever betrayed man.
Henry Adams
#28. 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
#29. 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
#30. There are two things that seem to be at the bottom of our constitutions; one is a continual tendency towards politics; the other is family pride; and it is strange how these two feelings run through all of us.
Henry Adams
#31. The proof that a philosopher does not know what he is talking about is apt to sadden his followers before it reacts on himself.
Henry Adams
#32. [Adams] supposed that, except musicians, everyone thought Beethoven a bore, as every one except mathematicians thought mathematics a bore.
Henry Adams
#33. Unity is vision; it must have been part of the process of learning to see.
Henry Adams
#34. 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
#35. If I grapple with sin in my own strength, the devil knows he may go to sleep.
Henry Adams
#36. The study of history is useful to the historian by teaching him his ignorance of women.
Henry Adams
#37. A senator is like a begonia - showy but useless.
Henry Adams
#38. The social side of Washington was to be taken for granted as three-fourths of existence. Politics and reform became the detail, and waltzing the profession
Henry Adams
#39. Teachers affect eternity. There is no telling where their influence stops.
Henry Adams
#40. American society is a sort of flat, fresh-water pond which absorbs silently, without reaction, anything which is thrown into it.
Henry Adams
#41. Power is poison. Its effect on Presidents had always been tragic.
Henry Adams
#42. Boys naturally look on all force as an enemy.
Henry Adams
#43. I tell you the solemn truth, that the doctrine of the Trinity is not so difficult to accept for a working proposition as any one of the axioms of physics.
Henry Adams
#44. During an election campaign the air is full of speeches and vice versa.
Henry Adams
#45. History will die if not irritated. The only service I can do to my profession is to serve as a flea.
Henry Adams
#46. Only on the edge of the grave can man conclude anything.
Henry Adams
#47. Those who seek education in the paths of duty are always deceived by the illusion that power in the hands of friends is an advantage to them.
Henry Adams
#48. 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
#49. 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
#50. Nothing is more tiresome than a superannuated pedagogue.
Henry Adams
#51. 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
#52. Young men most needed experience. They could not play well if they trusted to a general rule. Every card had a relative value. Principles had better be left aside; values were enough.
Henry Adams
#53. 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
#54. What one knows is, in youth, of little moment; they know enough who know how to learn.
Henry Adams
#55. 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
#56. Artists ... disappeared long ago as social forces. So did the church.
Henry Adams
#57. General Grant seriously remarked to a particularly bright young woman that Venice would be a fine city if it were drained.
Henry Adams
#58. 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
#59. 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
#60. Energy is the inherent effort of every multiplicity to become unity.
Henry Adams
#61. 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
#62. 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
#63. Politics cannot stop to study psychology Its methods are rough; its judgments rougher still.
Henry Adams
#64. It is now conceded that all idea of British intervention is at an end ... I want to hug the army of the Potomac. I want to get the whole army of Vicksburg drunk at my own expense. I want to fight some small man and lick him.
Henry Adams
#66. The scientific mind is atrophied, and suffers under inherited cerebral weakness, when it comes in contact with the eternal woman
Astarte, Isis, Demeter, Aphrodite, and the last and greatest deity of all, the Virgin.
Henry Adams
#67. A wise friend told me that we all could use more than one set of parents - our relations with the original set are too intense, and need dissipating.
Alice Adams
#68. 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
#69. An American Virgin would never dare command; an American Venus would never dare exist.
Henry Adams
#70. 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
#71. 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
#72. 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
#73. 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
#74. 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
#75. For reasons which many persons thought ridiculous, Mrs. Lightfoot Lee decided to pass the winter in Washington.
Henry Adams
#76. 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
#77. 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
#78. 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
#79. It is impossible to underrate human intelligence - beginning with one's own.
Henry Adams
#80. 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
#81. 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
#83. Knowledge of human nature is the beginning and end of political education.
Henry Adams
#84. As a historian, he felt it his duty to respect everything that had ever been respected, except for the occasional statesman.
Henry Adams
#85. I want to be advertised and the easiest way is to do something obnoxious and do it well.
Henry Adams
#86. 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
#87. One could not stay a month without loving the shabby town
Henry Adams
#88. 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
#89. Philosophy ... consists chiefly in suggesting unintelligible answers to insoluble problems.
Henry Adams
#90. One sought not absolute truth. One sought only a spool on which to wind the thread of history without breaking it.
Henry Adams
#91. The world is coming to an end in 1950.
Henry Adams
#92. Young men have a passion for regarding their elders as senile.
Henry Adams
#94. Power when wielded by abnormal energy is the most serious of facts.
Henry Adams
#95. Any schoolboy could see that man as a force must be measured by motion, from a fixed point.
Henry Adams
#96. Seward would inspire a cow with statesmanship if she understood our language.
Henry Adams
#97. To my fancy, one looks back on life, it has only two responsibilities, which include all the others: one is the bringing of new life into existence; the other, educating it after it is brought in. All betrayals of trust result from these original sins.
Henry Adams
#98. 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
#99. 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
#100. Man is an imperceptible atom always trying to become one with God.
Henry Adams
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