More from Henry Adams

  1. These questions of taste, of feeling, of inheritance, need no settlement. Every one carries his own inch-rule of taste, and amuses himself …
  2. Chaos often breeds life, when order breeds habit.
  3. Knowledge of human nature is the beginning and end of political education.
  4. At best, the renewal of broken relations is a nervous matter.
  5. Young men have a passion for regarding their elders as senile.
  6. Sumner's mind had reached the calm of water which receives and reflects images without absorbing them; it contained nothing but itself.
  7. 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.
  8. 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…

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