Famous Quotes & Sayings

Henry Adams Quotes & Sayings

Enjoy the top 100 famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Henry Adams.

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Famous Quotes By Henry Adams

Henry Adams Quotes 2187505

Yet the press was still the last resource of the educated poor who could not be artists and would not be tutors. Any man who was fit for nothing else could write an editorial or a criticism. The enormous mass of misinformation accumulated in ten years of nomad life could always be worked off on a helpless public, in diluted doses, if one could but secure a table in the corner of a newspaper office. The press was an inferior pulpit; an anonymous schoolmaster; a cheap boarding-school but it was still the nearest approach to a career for the literary survivor of a wrecked education. — Henry Adams

Henry Adams Quotes 410699

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 2033201

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

Henry Adams Quotes 1739520

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 858540

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 669850

What a vast fraternity it is,
that of 'Hearts that Ache.' For the last three months it has seemed to me as though all society were coming to me, to drop its mask for a moment and initiate me into the mystery. How we do suffer! And we go on laughing; for, as a practical joke at our expense, life is a success. — Henry Adams

Henry Adams Quotes 303478

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 1335685

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

Henry Adams Quotes 2005703

The progress of evolution from President Washington to President Grant was alone evidence to upset Darwin. — Henry Adams

Henry Adams Quotes 726113

Henry James chews more than he bites off. — Henry Adams

Henry Adams Quotes 1465789

[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 434958

An American Virgin would never dare command; an American Venus would never dare exist. — Henry Adams

Henry Adams Quotes 1971104

Man is an imperceptible atom always trying to become one with God. — Henry Adams

Henry Adams Quotes 577952

During an election campaign the air is full of speeches and vice versa. — Henry Adams

Henry Adams Quotes 2192193

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 1338250

As a means of variation from a normal type, sickness in childhood ought to have a certain value not to be classed under any fitness or unfitness of natural selection; and especially scarlet fever affected boys seriously, both physically and in character, though they might through life puzzle themselves to decide whether it had fitted or unfitted them for success. — Henry Adams

Henry Adams Quotes 476650

The proper study of mankind is woman. — Henry Adams

Henry Adams Quotes 1038052

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

Henry Adams Quotes 907156

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 1271051

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 1563709

The whole fabric of society will go to wrack if we really lay hands of reform on our rotten institutions. From top to bottom the whole system is a fraud, all of us know it, laborers and capitalists alike, and all of us are consenting parties to it. — Henry Adams

Henry Adams Quotes 868372

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 1127940

[Adams] supposed that, except musicians, everyone thought Beethoven a bore, as every one except mathematicians thought mathematics a bore. — Henry Adams

Henry Adams Quotes 2195510

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

Henry Adams Quotes 900506

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 1588228

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 1792510

Only on the edge of the grave can man conclude anything. — Henry Adams

Henry Adams Quotes 1582167

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 1595353

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

Henry Adams Quotes 1566835

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 1564325

Thank God, I never was cheerful. I come from the happy stock of the Mathers, who, as you remember, passed sweet mornings reflecting on the goodness of God and the damnation of infants. — Henry Adams

Henry Adams Quotes 1535272

As History stands, it is a sort of Chinese Play, without end and without lesson. — Henry Adams

Henry Adams Quotes 1491108

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 1489396

As a historian, he felt it his duty to respect everything that had ever been respected, except for the occasional statesman. — Henry Adams

Henry Adams Quotes 1479242

What one knows is, in youth, of little moment; they know enough who know how to learn. — Henry Adams

Henry Adams Quotes 1475298

The President may indeed in one respect resemble the commander of an army in peace, but in another and more essential sense he resembles the commander of a ship at sea. He must have a helm to grasp, a course to steer, a port to seek. He must sooner or later be convinced that a perpetual calm is as little to his purpose as a perpetual hurricane, and that without headway the ship can arrive nowhere. — Henry Adams

Henry Adams Quotes 1466488

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

Henry Adams Quotes 1460373

It is impossible to underrate human intelligence - beginning with one's own. — Henry Adams

Henry Adams Quotes 1977327

Philosophy ... consists chiefly in suggesting unintelligible answers to insoluble problems. — Henry Adams

Henry Adams Quotes 2233808

No historian can take part with
or against
the forces he has to study. To him even the extinction of the human race should merely be a fact to be grouped with other vital statistics. — Henry Adams

Henry Adams Quotes 2232523

Politics is simply the organization of hatreds. — Henry Adams

Henry Adams Quotes 2176108

Intimates are predestined. — Henry Adams

Henry Adams Quotes 2162903

Since [Rousseau's] 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. — Henry Adams

Henry Adams Quotes 2161539

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 2090221

Power is poison. Its effect on Presidents had always been tragic. — Henry Adams

Henry Adams Quotes 2009328

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

Henry Adams Quotes 2007721

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 1993441

Nothing in education is so astonishing as the amount of ignorance it accumulates in the form of inert facts. — Henry Adams

Henry Adams Quotes 1601019

History will die if not irritated. The only service I can do to my profession is to serve as a flea. — Henry Adams

Henry Adams Quotes 1946616

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 1923047

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 1922341

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

Henry Adams Quotes 1875437

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 1834823

History is only a value of relation. — Henry Adams

Henry Adams Quotes 1211973

Double standards are inspiration to men of letters, but they are apt to be fatal to politicians. — Henry Adams

Henry Adams Quotes 1788041

The world is coming to an end in 1950. — Henry Adams

Henry Adams Quotes 1725460

If Thought is capable of being classed with Electricity, or Will with chemical affinity, as a mode of motion, it seems necessary to fall at once under the second law of thermodynamics as one of the energies which most easily degrades itself, and, if not carefully guarded, returns bodily to the cheaper form called Heat. Of all possible theories, this is likely to prove the most fatal to Professors of History. — Henry Adams

Henry Adams Quotes 1697878

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

Henry Adams Quotes 380275

Simplicity is the most deceitful mistress that ever betrayed man. — Henry Adams

Henry Adams Quotes 660208

Analogies are figures intended to serve as fatal weapons if they succeed, and as innocent toys if they fail. — Henry Adams

Henry Adams Quotes 516161

Good men do the most harm. — Henry Adams

Henry Adams Quotes 501443

The work of internal government has become the task of controlling the thousands of fifth-rate men. — Henry Adams

Henry Adams Quotes 481165

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 470450

The capacity of women to make unsuitable marriages must be considered as the cornerstone of society. — Henry Adams

Henry Adams Quotes 454650

History is only a catalogue of the forgotten. — Henry Adams

Henry Adams Quotes 414152

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 390476

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

Henry Adams Quotes 384935

The hymns of David, the plays of Shakespeare, the metaphysics of Descartes, the crimes of Borgia, the virtues of Antonine, the atheism of yesterday and the materialism of today, were all emanations of divine thought, doing their appointed work. It was the duty of the church to deal with them all, not as though they existed through a power hostile to the deity, but as instruments of the deity to work out his unrevealed ends. — Henry Adams

Henry Adams Quotes 382334

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 704250

At best, the renewal of broken relations is a nervous matter. — Henry Adams

Henry Adams Quotes 324791

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 275947

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 226983

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 222004

The sensation of seeing extremely fine women, with superb forms, perfectly unconscious of undress, and yet evidently aware of their beauty and dignity, is worth a week's seasickness to experience ... To me the effect [of a Siva dance] was that of a dozen Rembrandts intensified into the most glowing beauty of life and motion. — Henry Adams

Henry Adams Quotes 215329

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 178379

In practice, such trifles as contradictions in principle are easily set aside; the faculty of ignoring them makes the practical man. — Henry Adams

Henry Adams Quotes 174854

A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops. — Henry Adams

Henry Adams Quotes 167459

Washington was no politician as we understand the word," replied Ratcliffe abruptly. "He stood outside of politics. The thing couldn't be done today. The people don't like that sort of royal airs. — Henry Adams

Henry Adams Quotes 116111

No man, however strong, can serve ten years as schoolmaster, priest, or Senator, and remain fit for anything else. — Henry Adams

Henry Adams Quotes 1021650

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 1386370

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

Henry Adams Quotes 1325953

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 1240056

For after all man knows mighty little, and may some day learn enough of his own ignorance to fall down again and pray. Not that Icare. Only, if such is God's will, and Fate and Evolution
let there be God! — Henry Adams

Henry Adams Quotes 1234030

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

Henry Adams Quotes 96166

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

Henry Adams Quotes 1125973

Teachers affect eternity. There is no telling where their influence stops. — Henry Adams

Henry Adams Quotes 1082381

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

Henry Adams Quotes 1048200

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

Henry Adams Quotes 1046737

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 1037140

Society' in America means all the honest, kindly-mannered, pleasant- voiced women, and all the good, brave, unassuming men, between the Atlantic and the Pacific. Each of these has a free pass in every city and village, 'good for this generation only,' and it depends on each to make use of this pass or not as it may happen to suit his or her fancy. — Henry Adams

Henry Adams Quotes 1416867

A certain secret jealousy of the British Minister is always lurking in the breast of every American Senator, if he is truly democratic; for democracy, rightly understood, is the government of the people, by the people, for the benefit of Senators, and there is always a danger that the British Minister may not understand this political principle as he should. — Henry Adams

Henry Adams Quotes 990353

The spectacle [of American politics] resembles that of swarms of insects changing from worms to wings. They must get the wings ordie. For our salvation, Mr. Wilbur Wright is providing wings. He will also have to provide a new insect to use them. — Henry Adams

Henry Adams Quotes 958024

The woman who is known only through a man is known wrong. — Henry Adams

Henry Adams Quotes 947296

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 933881

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

Henry Adams Quotes 926449

One could not stay a month without loving the shabby town — Henry Adams

Henry Adams Quotes 910534

An artist's business is only to see. — Henry Adams

Henry Adams Quotes 867948

The world grew cheap, as worlds must. — Henry Adams

Henry Adams Quotes 838467

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

Henry Adams Quotes 770671

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