Henry Adams Quotes

General Grant seriously remarked to a particularly bright young woman that Venice would be a fine city if it were drained.

Any schoolboy could see that man as a force must be measured by motion, from a fixed point.

Silence alone is respectable and respected. I believe God to be silence.

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

Intimates are predestined.

Man loves most that which is his own.

No man likes to have his intelligence or good faith questioned, especially if he has doubts about it himself.

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.

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

An artist's business is only to see.

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

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

The world grew cheap, as worlds must.

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

Charles Sumner's mind had reached the calm of WATER which receives and reflects images without absorbing them; it contains nothing but itself.

History is only a value of relation.

History is a tangled skein that one may take up at any point, and break when one has unravelled enough.

Of all studies, the one he would rather have avoided was that of his own mind. He knew no tragedy so heartrending as introspection.

It is always good men who do the most harm in the world.

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

If one shed tears, they must be shed on one's pillow.

Politics is simply the organization of hatreds.

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

The mind resorts to reason for want of training.

The proof that a philosopher does not know what he is talking about is apt to sadden his followers before it reacts on himself.

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.

History is the most aristocratic of all literary pursuits, because it obliges the historian to be rich as well as educated.

I hate photographs abstractly, because they have given me more ideas perversely and immovably wrong, than I ever should get by imagination.

A society in stable equilibrium is-by definition-one that has no history and wants no historians.

The world is coming to an end in 1950.

The tourist was the great conservative who hated novelty and adored dirt.

Friends are born, not made.

Susceptibility to the highest forces is the highest genius.

One could not stay a month without loving the shabby town

Energy is the inherent effort of every multiplicity to become unity.

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

Artists ... disappeared long ago as social forces. So did the church.

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

Politics are a very unsatisfactory game.

Absolute liberty is absence of restraint; responsibility is restraint; therefore, the ideally free individual is responsible to himself.

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

When one thinks what one leaves in the world when one dies, Only silence is strong, - all the rest is but lies.

All taxation is an evil, but heavy taxes, indiscriminately levied on every everything are one of the greatest curses that can afflict a people

One sought not absolute truth. One sought only a spool on which to wind the thread of history without breaking it.

Chaos was the law of nature; Order was the dream of man.

The Jewish question is really the most serious of our problems.

A friend in power is a friend lost.

No man can instruct more than half-a-dozen students at once. The whole problem of education is one of its cost in money.

History is only a catalogue of the forgotten.

Every mane should have a fair sized cemetery in which to bury the faults of his friend.

Only on the edge of the grave can man conclude anything.

The photograph is a coarse fraud, and seems to delight only in taking the whole beauty out of the picture.

Chaos often breeds life, when order breeds habit.

The proper study of mankind is woman.

We combat obstacles in order to get repose, and when got, the repose is insupportable.

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

The woman who is known only through a man is known wrong.

One does every day and without a second thought, what at another time would be the event of a year, perhaps of a life.

It [love] is a disease to be born with patience, like any nervous complaint, and to be treated with counter-irritants.

Unity is vision; it must have been part of the process of learning to see.

Some day science may have the existence of mankind in power, and the human race can commit suicide by blowing up the world.

Simplicity is the most deceitful mistress that ever betrayed man.

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

Philosophy ... consists chiefly in suggesting unintelligible answers to insoluble problems.

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

There is no such thing as an underestimate of average intelligence.

Laplace would have found it child's-play to fix a ratio of progression in mathematical science between Descartes, Leibnitz, Newton and himself

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

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

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

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.

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.

We shall some day catch an abstract truth by the tail, and then we shall have our religion and our immortality.

He too serves a certain purpose who only stands and cheers.

Young men have a passion for regarding their elders as senile.

The less a tourist knows, the fewer mistakes he need make, for he will not expect himself to explain ignorance.

Whenever a man reaches the top of the political ladder, his enemies unite to pull him down. His friends become critical and exacting.

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.

Seward would inspire a cow with statesmanship if she understood our language.

In the one branch he most needed

No man means all he says, and yet very few say all they mean, for words are slippery and thought is viscous.

Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed. The imagination must be given not wings but weights.

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.

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.

I want to be advertised and the easiest way is to do something obnoxious and do it well.

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

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

Nothing is easier to teach than historical method, but, when learned, it has little use.

A senator is like a begonia - showy but useless.

Life is a narrow valley, and the roads run close together

Accident counts for as much in companionship as in marriage.

Nothing is more tiresome than a superannuated pedagogue.

The world can absorb only doses of truth," he said; "too much would kill it." One sought education in order to adjust the dose.

Teachers affect eternity; no one can tell where their influence stops.

For reasons which many persons thought ridiculous, Mrs. Lightfoot Lee decided to pass the winter in Washington.

Henry James chews more than he bites off.

Knowledge of human nature is the beginning and end of political education.

Everyone must bear his own universe, and most persons are moderately interested in learning how their neighbors have managed to carry theirs.

A man must now swallow more belief than he can digest.

Good men do the most harm.