Best 201 quotes of Henry Adams on MyQuotes

Henry Adams

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    Henry Adams

    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.

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    Henry Adams

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

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    Henry Adams

    Accident counts for as much in companionship as in marriage.

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    Henry Adams

    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.

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    Henry Adams

    A congressman is a pig. The only way to get his snout from the trough is to rap it sharply with a stick.

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    Henry Adams

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

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    Henry Adams

    A friend in power is a friend lost.

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    Henry Adams

    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.

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    Henry Adams

    [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.

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    Henry Adams

    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

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    Henry Adams

    All experience is an arch, to build upon.

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    Henry Adams

    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.

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    Henry Adams

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

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    Henry Adams

    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.

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    Henry Adams

    American art, like the American language and American education, was as far as possible sexless.

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    Henry Adams

    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.

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    Henry Adams

    American society is a sort of flat, fresh-water pond which absorbs silently, without reaction, anything which is thrown into it.

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    Henry Adams

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

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    Henry Adams

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

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    Henry Adams

    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

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    Henry Adams

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

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    Henry Adams

    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.

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    Henry Adams

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

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    Henry Adams

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

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    Henry Adams

    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.

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    Henry Adams

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

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    Henry Adams

    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.

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    Henry Adams

    As history stands, it is a sort of Chinese play, without end andl without lesson. With these impressions I wrote the last line of my History, asking for a round century before going further.

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    Henry Adams

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

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    Henry Adams

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

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    Henry Adams

    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.

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    Henry Adams

    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.

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    Henry Adams

    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.

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    Henry Adams

    Chaos often breeds life, when order breeds habit.

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    Henry Adams

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

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    Henry Adams

    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.

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    Henry Adams

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

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    Henry Adams

    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.

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    Henry Adams

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

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    Henry Adams

    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.

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    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.

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    Henry Adams

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

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    Henry Adams

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

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    Henry Adams

    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.

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    Henry Adams

    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!

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    Henry Adams

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

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    Henry Adams

    Friends are born, not made.

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    Henry Adams

    From cradle to grave this problem of running order through chaos, direction through space, discipline through freedom, unity through multiplicity, has always been, and must always be, the task of education, as it is the moral of religion, philosophy, science, art, politics and economy; but 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.

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    Henry Adams

    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.

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    Henry Adams

    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.