Henry Adams

Historian

1838-02-16

Quotes by Henry Adams

• Washington was no politician as we understand the word, replied Ratcliffe abruptly. He stood outside of politics. The thing couldn't be done today. The people don't like that sort of royal airs.

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

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• 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.

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

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• 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.

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• 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.

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

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• 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.

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

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• Good men do the most harm.

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• 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.

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• 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.

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• 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.

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

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

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• 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.

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

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• 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.

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

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• Good men do the most harm.

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