Henry Adams Quotes

Any schoolboy could see that man as a force must be measured by motion, from a fixed point.

The photograph is a coarse fraud, and seems to delight only in taking the whole beauty out of the picture.

Analogies are figures intended to serve as fatal weapons if they succeed, and as innocent toys if they fail.

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.

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

By nature, man is lazy, working only under compulsion; and when he is strong we will always live, as far as he can, upon the labor or the property of the weak.

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

His brothers were the type; he was the variation.

American art, like the American language and American education, was as far as possible sexless.

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.

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

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

The tourist was the great conservative who hated novelty and adored dirt.

The less a tourist knows, the fewer mistakes he need make, for he will not expect himself to explain ignorance.

Teachers affect eternity. There is no telling where their influence stops.

It [love] is a disease to be born with patience, like any nervous complaint, and to be treated with counter-irritants.

Charles Sumner's mind had reached the calm of WATER which receives and reflects images without absorbing them; it contains nothing but itself.

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.

Nothing is more tiresome than a superannuated pedagogue.

An artist's business is only to see.

Intimates are predestined.

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.

Artists... disappeared long ago as social forces. So did the church.

Laplace would have found it child's-play to fix a ratio of progression in mathematical science between Descartes, Leibnitz, Newton and himself

As History stands, it is a sort of Chinese Play, without end and without lesson.

One sought not absolute truth. One sought only a spool on which to wind the thread of history without breaking it.

If our minds could get hold of one abstract truth, they would be immortal so far as that truth is concerned. My trouble is to find out how we can get hold of the truth at all.

History is only a value of relation.

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.

In the one branch he most needed

Every one must bear his own universe, and most persons are moderately interested in learning how their neighbors have managed to carry theirs.

Nothing is easier than to teach historical method, but, when learned, it has little use.

Man loves most that which is his own.

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.

An American Virgin would never dare command; an American Venus would never dare exist.

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

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.

I hate photographs abstractly, because they have given me more ideas perversely and immovably wrong, than I ever should get by imagination.

History is a tangled skein that one may take up at any point, and break when one has unravelled enough.

One could not stay a month without loving the shabby town

Mathematicians practice absolute freedom.

Church and State, Soul and Body, God and Man, are all one at Mont Saint Michel, and the business of all is to fight, each in his own way, or to stand guard for each other.

We shall some day catch an abstract truth by the tail, and then we shall have our religion and our immortality.

Teachers affect eternity; no one can tell where their influence stops.

Even theologians, even the great theologians of the thirteenth century, even Saint Thomas Aquinas himself did not trust to faith alone, or assume the existence of God.

The mind resorts to reason for want of training.

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

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

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.

These questions of taste, of feeling, of inheritance, need no settlement. Everyone carries his own inch-rule of taste, and amuses himself by applying it, triumphantly, wherever he travels.