Henry Adams Quotes
-
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.
→ -
The study of history is useful to the historian by teaching him his ignorance of women.
→ -
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.
→ -
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.
→ -
In practice, such trifles as contradictions in principle are easily set aside; the faculty of ignoring them makes the practical man.
→ -
The photograph is a coarse fraud, and seems to delight only in taking the whole beauty out of the picture.
→ -
A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops.
→ -
Man always made, and still makes, grotesque blunders in selecting and measuring forces, taken at random from the heap, but he never made a mistake in the value he set on the whole, which he symbolized as unity and worshipped as God. To this day, his attitude towards it has never changed, though science can no longer give to force a name.
→ -
Accident counts for as much in companionship as in marriage.
→ -
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.
→ -
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 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.
→ -
Whenever a man reaches the top of the political ladder, his enemies unite to pull him down. His friends become critical and exacting.
→ -
The capacity of women to make unsuitable marriages must be considered as the cornerstone of society.
→ -
Intimates are predestined.
→ -
Mr Jefferson meant that the American system should be a democracy, and he would rather have let the whole world perish than that this principle, which to him represented all that man was worth, should fail. Mr Hamilton considered democracy a fatal curse, and meant to stop its progress.
→ -
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.
→ -
You say that love is nonsense. I tell you it is no such thing. For weeks and months it is a steady physical pain, an ache about the heart, never leaving one, by night or by day; a long strain on one's nerves like toothache or rheumatism, not intolerable at any one instant, but exhausting by its steady drain on the strength.
→ -
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.
→ -
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.
→ -
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.
→ -
Power is poison. Its effect on Presidents had always been tragic.
→ -
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.
→ -
Only on the edge of the grave can man conclude anything.
→ -
Simplicity is the most deceitful mistress that ever betrayed man.
→ -
Mathematicians practice absolute freedom.
→ -
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.
→ -
[P]hilosophy . . .consists chiefly in suggesting unintelligible answers to insoluble problems.
→ -
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
→
Related Authors
-
Augustus Saint-Gaudens Sculptor -
Jane Addams Sociologist -
Alexander Hamilton Founding Father of the United States -
Enrico Caruso Opera singer -
Theodore Roosevelt 26th U.S. President -
James Truslow Adams Writer -
Imogen Cunningham Photographer -
John Hay Former United States Secretary of State -
Charles Francis Adams, Sr. American Politician -
Joseph Addison Essayist -
Henry Cabot Lodge Former United States Senator -
George Bancroft Historian -
Abigail Adams Former First Lady of the United States -
-
Henry James Writer -
Albert Gallatin Former American senator -
John Adams 2nd U.S. President -
Marian Hooper Adams Photographer -
William James Philosopher -
John Quincy Adams 6th U.S. President