Quote #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.

More from Henry Adams

  1. Knowledge of human nature is the beginning and end of political education.
  2. Intimates are predestined.
  3. Young men have a passion for regarding their elders as senile.
  4. Chaos often breeds life, when order breeds habit.
  5. 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.
  6. At best, the renewal of broken relations is a nervous matter.
  7. A friend in power is a friend lost.
  8. Sumner's mind had reached the calm of water which receives and reflects images without absorbing them; it contained nothing but itself.

All Henry Adams quotes