“A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops.”
― Henry Adams
“No man likes to have his intelligence or good faith questioned, especially if he has doubts about it himself.”
― Henry Adams
“All experience is an arch, to build upon.”
― Henry Adams
“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
“Some day science may have the existence of mankind in power, and the human race can commit suicide by blowing up the world.”
― Henry Adams
“Young men have a passion for regarding their elders as senile.”
― Henry Adams
“No one means all he says, and yet very few say all they mean, for words are slippery and thought is viscous.”
― Henry Adams
“One friend in a lifetime is much, two are many, three are hardly possible. Friendship needs a certain parallelism of life, a community of thought, a rivalry of aim.”
― Henry Adams
“Philosophy: Unintelligible answers to insoluble problems.”
― Henry Adams
“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
“Politics, as a practise, whatever its professions, has always been the systematic organization of hatreds.”
― Henry Adams
“Simplicity is the most deceitful mistress that ever betrayed man.”
― Henry Adams
“Practical politics consists in ignoring facts.”
― Henry Adams
“Politics… have always been the systematic organization of hatreds.”
― Henry Adams
“Power is poison. Its effect on Presidents had always been tragic.”
― Henry Adams
“Chaos was the law of nature; Order was the dream of man.”
― Henry Adams
“A man must now swallow more belief than he can digest.”
― 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
“He too serves a certain purpose who only stands and cheers.”
― Henry Adams
“They know enough who know how to learn.”
― Henry Adams
“At best, the renewal of broken relations is a nervous matter.”
― 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
“No man should be in politics unless he would honestly rather not be there.”
― Henry Adams
“A friend in power is a friend lost.”
― Henry Adams
“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
“There is no such thing as an underestimate of average intelligence.”
― Henry Adams
“It is impossible to underrate human intelligence – beginning with one’s own.”
― Henry Adams
“Intimates are predestined.”
― Henry Adams
“Only on the edge of the grave can man conclude anything.”
― 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
“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
“It is always good men who do the most harm in the world.”
― 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
“Nothing in education is so astonishing as the amount of ignorance it accumulates in the form of inert facts.”
― Henry Adams
“Friends are born, not made.”
― 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
“Chaos often breeds life, when order breeds habit.”
― Henry Adams
“No man, however strong, can serve ten years as schoolmaster, priest, or Senator, and remain fit for anything else.”
― Henry Adams
“Politics are a very unsatisfactory game.”
― Henry Adams
“The progress of evolution from President Washington to President Grant was alone evidence to upset Darwin.”
― Henry Adams
“The woman who is known only through a man is known wrong.”
― Henry Adams
“Accident counts for as much in companionship as in marriage.”
― Henry Adams
“The proper study of mankind is woman.”
― Henry Adams
“Absolute liberty is absence of restraint; responsibility is restraint; therefore, the ideally free individual is responsible to himself.”
― 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
“Everyone carries his own inch rule of taste, and amuses himself by applying it, triumphantly, wherever he travels.”
― Henry Adams
“Morality is a private and costly luxury.”
― Henry Adams
“Man is an imperceptible atom always trying to become one with God.”
― Henry Adams
“Knowledge of human nature is the beginning and end of political education.”
― Henry Adams
“Power when wielded by abnormal energy is the most serious of facts.”
― Henry Adams
“Susceptibility to the highest forces is the highest genius.”
― 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
“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
“We combat obstacles in order to get repose, and when got, the repose is insupportable.”
― Henry Adams
Leave a Reply