47 Henry Adams Quotes

Henry Adams offers thoughtful, plain-spoken reflections on life, politics and learning.

For reasons which many persons thought ridiculous, Mrs. Lightfoot Lee decided to pass the winter in Washington.
#1
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.
#2
Accident counts for much in companionship as in marriage.
#3
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.
#4
All experience is an arch, to build upon.
#5
Only on the edge of the grave can man conclude anything.
#6
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.
#7
Friends are born, not made.
#8
A friend in power is a friend lost.
#9
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.
#10
Young men have a passion for regarding their elders as senile.
#11
Knowledge of human nature is the beginning and end of political education.
#12
These questions of taste, of feeling, of inheritance, need no settlement. Every one carries his own inch-rule of taste, and amuses himself by applying it, triumphantly, wherever he travels.
#13
Intimates are predestined.
#14
Chaos often breeds life, when order breeds habit.
#15
At best, the renewal of broken relations is a nervous matter.
#16
Sumner's mind had reached the calm of water which receives and reflects images without absorbing them; it contained nothing but itself.
#17
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.
#18
A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops.
#19
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.
#20
What one knows is, in youth, of little moment; they know enough who know how to learn.
#21
He had often noticed that six months' oblivion amounts to newspaper-death, and that resurrection is rare. Nothing is easier, if a man wants it, than rest, profound as the grave.
#22
Morality is a private and costly luxury.
#23
Practical politics consists in ignoring facts.
#24
Nothing in education is so astonishing as the amount of ignorance it accumulates in the form of inert facts.
#25
Power when wielded by abnormal energy is the most serious of facts.
#26
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.
#27
Modern politics is, at bottom, a struggle not of men but of forces.
#28
We combat obstacles in order to get repose, and, when got, the repose is insupportable.
#29
Simplicity is the most deceitful mistress that ever betrayed man.
#30
No one means all he says, and yet very few say all they mean, for words are slippery and thought is viscous.
#31
Even in America, 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.
#32
Absolute liberty is absence of restraint; responsibility is restraint; therefore, the ideally free individual is responsible to himself.
#33
Everyone carries his own inch-rule of taste, and amuses himself by applying it, triumphantly, wherever he travels.
#34
Henry James chews more than he bites off.
#35
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.
#36
It is impossible to underrate human intelligence- beginning with one's own.
#37
Man is an imperceptible atom always trying to become one with God.
#38
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.
#39
No man likes to have his intelligence or good faith questioned, especially if he has doubts about it himself.
#40
No man, however strong, can serve ten years as schoolmaster, priest, or Senator, and remain fit for anything else.
#41
Philosophy: unintelligible answers to insoluble problems.
#42
Politics, as a practice, whatever its professions, has always been the systematic organization of hatreds.
#43
The woman who is known only through a man is known wrong.
#44
The work of internal government has become the task of controlling the thousands of fifth-rate men.
#45
There is no such thing as an underestimate of average intelligence.
#46
Never esteem anything as of advantage to you that will make you break your word or lose your self-respect.
#47
Attribution disputed; shown as originally published.

Henry Adams quotes