Henry Adams Quotes

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

~ Henry Adams

The first serious consciousness of Nature's gesture - her attitude towards life-took form then as a phantasm, a nightmare, all insanity of force. For the first time, the stage-scenery of the senses collapsed; the human mind felt itself stripped naked, vibrating in a void of shapeless energies, with resistless mass, colliding, crushing, wasting, and destroying what these same energies had created and labored from eternity to perfect.

~ 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 habit of expression leads to the search for something to express. Something remains as a residuum of the commonplace itself, if one strikes out every commonplace in the expression.

~ Henry Adams

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

~ Henry Adams

The habit of looking at life as a social relation — an affair of society — did no good. It cultivated a weakness which needed no cultivation. If it had helped to make men of the world, or give the manners and instincts of any profession — such as temper, patience, courtesy, or a faculty of profiting by the social defects of opponents — it would have been education better worth having than mathematics or languages; but so far as it helped to make anything, it helped only to make the college standard permanent through life.

~ Henry Adams

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

~ Henry Adams

A friend in power is a friend lost.

~ 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 possible.

~ Henry Adams

A new friend is always a miracle...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

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.

~ Henry Adams

The study of history is useful to the historian by teaching him his ignorance of women.

~ Henry Adams

For the first time in his life, Mont Blanc for a moment looked to him what it was - a chaos of anarchic and purposeless forces - and he needed days of repose to see it clothe itself again with the illusions of his senses, the white purity of its snows, the splendor of its light, and the infinity of its heavenly peace. Nature was kind; Lake Geneva was beautiful beyond itself, and the Alps put on charms real as terrors.

~ Henry Adams

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

~ Henry Adams

He supposed that, except musicians, every one thought Beethoven a bore, as every one except mathematicians thought mathematics a bore.

~ Henry Adams

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

~ 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

Charles Francis Adams was singular for mental poise — absence of self-assertion or self-consciousness — the faculty of standing apart without seeming aware that he was alone — a balance of mind and temper that neither challenged nor avoided notice, nor admitted question of superiority or inferiority, of jealousy, of personal motives, from any source, even under great pressure.

~ Henry Adams

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

~ Henry Adams

I, too, like yourself was a good party man: my party was that of the Church; I was ultramontane. Your party system is one of your thefts from our Church; your National Convention is our Ecunemic Council; you abdicate reason, as we do, before its decisions; and you yourself Mr. Ratcliffe, you are a Cardinal.

~ Henry Adams

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

One had heard and read a great deal about death, and even seen a little of it, and knew by heart the thousand commonplaces of religion and poetry which seemed to deaden one's senses and veil the horror. Society being immortal, could put on immortality at will. Adams being mortal, felt only the mortality. Death took features altogether new to him, in these rich and sensuous surroundings. Nature enjoyed it, played with it, the horror added to her charm, she liked the torture, and smothered her victim with caresses. Never had one seen her so winning. The hot Italian summer brooded outside, over the market-place and the picturesque peasants, and, in the singular color of the Tuscan atmosphere, the hills and vineyards of the Apennines seemed bursting with mid-summer blood. The sick-room itself glowed with the Italian joy of life; friends filled it; no harsh northern lights pierced the soft shadows; even the dying women shared the sense of the Italian summer, the soft, velvet air, the humor, the courage, the sensual fulness of Nature and man. She faced death, as women mostly do, bravely and even gaily, racked slowly to unconsciousness, but yielding only to violence, as a soldier sabred in battle. For many thousands of years, on these hills and plains, Nature had gone on sabring men and women with the same air of sensual pleasure.

~ Henry Adams

These questions of taste, of feeling, of inheritance, need no settlement. Everyone carries his own inch-rule of taste, and amuses himself by applying it, triumphantly, wherever he travels.

~ 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.

~ Henry Adams

Evolution of mind was altogether another matter and belonged to another science, but whether one traced descent from the shark or the wolf was immaterial even in morals. This matter had been discussed for ages without scientific result. La Fontaine and other fabulists maintained that the wolf, even in morals, stood higher than man; and in view of the late civil war, Adams had doubts of his own on the facts of moral evolution:

~ Henry Adams

A friend in power is a friend lost.

~ Henry Adams

Friendship needs a certain parallelism of life a community of thought a rivalry of aim.

~ Henry Adams

Chaos often breeds life when order breeds habit.

~ Henry Adams

A teacher affects eternity he can never tell where his influence stops.

~ Henry Adams

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

~ 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

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

~ Henry Adams

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

~ 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

Chaos often breeds life, when order breeds habit.

~ Henry Adams

All experience is an arch, to build upon.

~ Henry Adams

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

~ Henry Adams

Practical politics consists in ignoring facts.

~ Henry Adams

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

~ Henry Adams