Henry Adams Quotes

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

67 quotes

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

2. 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.

3. Accident counts for much in companionship as in marriage.

4. 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.

5. All experience is an arch, to build upon.

6. Only on the edge of the grave can man conclude anything.

7. 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.

8. Friends are born, not made.

9. A friend in power is a friend lost.

10. 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.

11. Young men have a passion for regarding their elders as senile.

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

13. 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.

14. Intimates are predestined.

15. Chaos often breeds life, when order breeds habit.

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

17. Sumner's mind had reached the calm of water which receives and reflects images without absorbing them; it contained nothing but itself.

18. 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.

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

20. 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.

21. What one knows is, in youth, of little moment; they know enough who know how to learn.

22. 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.

23. Morality is a private and costly luxury.

24. Practical politics consists in ignoring facts.

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

26. Power when wielded by abnormal energy is the most serious of facts.

27. 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.

28. Modern politics is, at bottom, a struggle not of men but of forces.

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

30. Simplicity is the most deceitful mistress that ever betrayed man.

31. No one means all he says, and yet very few say all they mean, for words are slippery and thought is viscous.

32. 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.

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

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

35. Henry James chews more than he bites off.

36. 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.

37. It is impossible to underrate human intelligence- beginning with one's own.

38. Man is an imperceptible atom always trying to become one with God.

39. 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.

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

41. No man, however strong, can serve ten years as schoolmaster, priest, or Senator, and remain fit for anything else.

42. Philosophy: unintelligible answers to insoluble problems.

43. Politics, as a practice, whatever its professions, has always been the systematic organization of hatreds.

44. The woman who is known only through a man is known wrong.

45. The work of internal government has become the task of controlling the thousands of fifth-rate men.

46. There is no such thing as an underestimate of average intelligence.

47. Never esteem anything as of advantage to you that will make you break your word or lose your self-respect.

48. [P]hilosophy . . .consists chiefly in suggesting unintelligible answers to insoluble problems.

49. “Philosophy . . .consists chiefly in suggesting unintelligible answers to insoluble problems.”

50. I am fairly tired--bored beyond endurance--by the world we live in, and its ideals, and am ready to say so, not violently, but kindly, as one rubs salt into the back of a flogged sailor as though one loved him.

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

52. The American President resembles the commander of a ship at sea. He must have a helm to grasp, a course to steer, a port to seek.

53. The proof that a philosopher does not know what he is talking about is apt to sadden his followers before it reacts on himself.

54. No man should be in politics unless he would honestly rather not be there.

55. 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.

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

57. 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.

58. You may cut off the heads of every rich man now living--of every statesman--every literary, and every scientific authority, without in the least changing the social situation. Artists, of course, disappeared long ago as social forces. So did the church. Corporations are not elevators, but levellers, as I see them.

59. History is the most aristocratic of all literary pursuits, because it obliges the historian to be rich as well as educated.

60. 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.

61. History is only a catalogue of the forgotten.

62. In practice, such trifles as contradictions in principle are easily set aside; the faculty of ignoring them makes the practical man.

63. The Virgin filled so enormous a space in the life and thought of the time that one stands now helpless before the mass of testimony to her direct action and constant presence in every moment and form of the illusion which men thought they thought their existence.

64. Nothing is more tiresome than a superannuated pedagogue.

65. The press is the hired agent of a monied system, and set up for no other purpose than to tell lies where their interests are involved. One can trust nobody and nothing.

66. 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.

67. 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.