Henry Adams famous quotes

All experience is an arch, to build upon.
-- Henry Adams

#Inspirational #Moving On #Science

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

#Inspirational #Leadership #Education

Chaos was the law of nature; Order was the dream of man.
-- Henry Adams

#Dream #Nature #Men

One friend in a life-time 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

#Real #Two #Community

One friend in a lifetime is much; two are many; three are hardly possible.
-- Henry Adams

#Friendship #Two #Three

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

#Men #Doubt #Likes

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

#Sarcastic #Sarcasm #Average

Everyone carries his own inch rule of taste, and amuses himself by applying it, triumphantly, wherever he travels.
-- Henry Adams

#Travel #Taste #Inches

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

#History #Fleas #Irritated

A parent gives life, but as parent, gives no more. A murderer takes life, but his deed stops there. A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops.
-- Henry Adams

#Teacher #Giving #Parent

A friend in power is a friend lost.
-- Henry Adams

#Love #Best Friend #Friendship

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

#Political #Beginnings And Ends #Human Nature

Morality is a private and costly luxury.
-- Henry Adams

#Luxury #Ethics #Morality

Chaos breeds life; Order creates habit.
-- Henry Adams

#Change #Order #Chaos

I think that Lee should have been hanged. It was all the worse that he was a good man and a fine character and acted conscientiously. It's always the good men who do the most harm in the world.
-- Henry Adams

#War #Character #Men

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

#Order #Sloth #Laziness

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

#Lying #Heart #Men

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

#Philosophy #Medicine #Order

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

#Cheer #Purpose #Politics

They know enough who know how to learn.
-- Henry Adams

#Education #Teacher #Learning

The chief wonder of education is that it does not ruin everybody concerned in it, teachers and taught.
-- Henry Adams

#Education #Teacher #Retirement

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

#Education #Teaching #Ignorance

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

#Responsibility #Liberty #Absence

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

#Broken Heart #Broken Promises #Matter

A boy's will is his life, and he dies when it is broken, as the colt dies in harness, taking a new nature in becoming tame.
-- Henry Adams

#Boys #Men #Broken

Politics cannot stop to study psychology Its methods are rough; its judgments rougher still.
-- Henry Adams

#Psychology #Study #Judgment

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

#Men #Political #Enemy

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

#Tears #Pillow #Shed

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

#Laughing #Society #Vices

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

#Travel #Mistake #Ignorance

Nothing is more tiresome than a superannuated pedagogue.
-- Henry Adams

#Teaching

In the one branch he most needed
-- Henry Adams

#Math #Branches #Needed

Mathematicians practice absolute freedom.
-- Henry Adams

#Practice #Statistics #Mathematician

Power is poison. Its effect on Presidents has been always tragic, chiefly as an almost indecent excitement at first, and a worse reaction afterwards; but also because no mind is so well balanced as to bear the strain of seizing unlimited force without habit or knowledge of it; and finding it disputed with him by hungry packs of wolves and hounds whose lives depend on snatching the carion.
-- Henry Adams

#Mind #President #Poison

Susceptibility to the highest forces is the highest genius.
-- Henry Adams

#Genius #Force

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

#Serious #Problem #Jew

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

#Marriage #Capacity

Every one must bear his own universe, and most persons are moderately interested in learning how their neighbors have managed to carry theirs.
-- Henry Adams

#Friendship #Bears #Neighbor

If I grapple with sin in my own strength, the devil knows he may go to sleep.
-- Henry Adams

#Strength #Sleep #Devil

His brothers were the type; he was the variation.
-- Henry Adams

#Family #Brother #Variation

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

#Travel #Tourists #Dirt

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

#Government #Giving #Office

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

#Women #Moral #Settling

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

#Class #America #Boredom

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

#People #Evil #Taxation

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

#War #Heart #Enemy

At the utmost, the active-minded young man should ask of his teacher only mastery of his tools. The young man himself, the subject of education, is a certain form of energy; the object to be gained is economy of his force; the training is partly the clearing away of obstacles, partly the direct application of effort. Once acquired, the tools and models may be thrown away.
-- Henry Adams

#Teacher #Men #Effort

The proper study of mankind is woman.
-- Henry Adams

#Nature #Humanity #Study

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

#Nature #Men #Men And Women

Boys naturally look on all force as an enemy.
-- Henry Adams

#Boys #Enemy #Looks

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

#Talking #Doe #Followers

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

#Strong #Men #Lazy

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

#Love #Disease #Nervous

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

#Love Is #Average #Perfect

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

#Race #History #Facts

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

#Men #Force #Fixed

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

#Summer #Country #Lying

Every one who marries goes it blind, more or less.
-- Henry Adams

#Marriage #Blind

A period of about twelve years measured the beat of the pendulum. After the Declaration of Independence, twelve years had been needed to create an efficient Constitution; another twelve years of energy brought a reaction against the government then created; a third period of twelve years was ending in a sweep toward still greater energy; and already a child could calculate the result of a few more such returns.
-- Henry Adams

#Children #Years #Government

[regarding US conquest of the Philippines] "I turn green in bed at midnight if I think of the horror of a year's warfare in the Philippines [...] We must slaughter a million or two foolish Malays in order to give them the comforts of flannel petticoats and electric railways.
-- Henry Adams

#Thinking #Order #Years

No man, however strong, can serve ten years as schoolmaster, priest, or Senator, and remain fit for anything else. All the dogmatic stations in life have the effect of fixing a certain stiffness of attitude forever, as though they mesmerised the subject.
-- Henry Adams

#Strong #Attitude #Men

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

#Inferiority #Likes #Outsiders

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

#Vices #Excess #Whiskey

Modern politics is, at bottom, a struggle not of men but of forces.
-- Henry Adams

#Struggle #Men #Modern

Even theologians, even the great theologians of the thirteenth century, even Saint Thomas Aquinas himself did not trust to faith alone, or assume the existence of God.
-- Henry Adams

#Saint #Assuming #Century

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

#Teacher #Mind #Doubt

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

#Giving #Way #Downers

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

#Rap #Pigs #Way

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

#War #Believe #Sunday

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

#War #Fighting #Army

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

#War #Years #History

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

#Hands #Path #Illusion

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

#Character #Mean #Boys

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

#Artist #Long #Church

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

#Editing #Retrospect #Rebel

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

#Real #Democracy #Likes

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

#Artist

There have been times when the church seemed afraid, but she is no longer. Analyze, dissect, use your microscope or your spectrum till the last atom of matter is reached; reflect and refine till the last element of thought is made clear; the church now knows with the certainty of science what she once knew only by the certainty of faith, that you will find enthroned behind all thought and matter only one central idea--that idea which the church has never ceased to embody--I AM!
-- Henry Adams

#Ideas #Church #Matter

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

#Education #Mind #Purpose

Education should try to lessen the obstacles, diminish the friction, invigorate the energy, and should train minds to react, not at haphazard, but by choice, on the lines of force that attract their world. What one knows is, in youth, of little moment; they know enough who know how to learn.
-- Henry Adams

#Education #Choices #Mind

Unbroken 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

#Law #Deities #Bishops

Man loves most that which is his own.
-- Henry Adams

#Love #Men

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

#Marriage #Children #Men

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

#Marriage #Passion #Men

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

#Teaching #Men #Cost

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

#Men #Community #Quality

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

#Yesterday #Play #Hymns

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

#Philosophy #Church #Answers

Man had in the beginning no power of analysis or synthesis approaching that of the spider, or even of the honey-bee; he had acute sensibility to the higher forces. Fire taught him secrets that no other animal could learn; running water probably taught him even more, especially in his first lessons of mechanics; the animals helped to educate him, trusting themselves into his hands merely for the sake of their food, and carrying his burdens or supplying his clothing; the grasses and grains were academies of study.
-- Henry Adams

#Running #Men #Animal

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

#Men #Ideas #Insane

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

#Political #Occasional #Duty