Henry Adams > Quotes

“Chaos often breeds life, when order breeds habit.”
― Henry Adams

“A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops.”
― Henry Adams

“Chaos was the law of nature; Order was the dream of man.”
― Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams

“No man means all he says, and yet very few say all they mean, for words are slippery and thought is viscous.”
― Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams

“Friends are born, not made.”
― Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams

“A parent gives life, but as parent, gives no more. A murderer takes life, but his deed stops there. A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops.”
― Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams

“Unity is vision; it must have been part of the process of learning to see.”
― Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams

“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.”
― Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams

“The chief wonder of education is that it does not ruin everybody concerned in it, teachers and taught.”
― Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams

“A friend in power is a friend lost.”
― Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams

“Nothing in education is so astonishing as the amount of ignorance it accumulates in the form of inert facts.”
― Henry Brooks Adams

“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.”
― Henry Adams

“He never labored so hard to learn a language as he did to hold his tongue, and it affected him for life. The habit of reticence — of talking without meaning — is never effaced.”
― Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams

“Knowledge of human nature is the beginning and end of political education.”
― Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams

“Of all studies, the one he would rather have avoided was that of his own mind. He knew no tragedy so heartrending as introspection.”
― Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams

“Philosophy . . .consists chiefly in suggesting unintelligible answers to insoluble problems.”
― Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams

“Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed. The imagination must be given not wings but weights.”
― Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams

“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.”
― Henry Adams

“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.”
― Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams

“You say that love is nonsense.... I tell you it is no such thing. For weeks and months it is a steady physical pain, an ache about the heart, never leaving one, by night or by day; a long strain on one's nerves like toothache or rheumatism, not intolerable at any one instant, but exhausting by its steady drain on the strength.”
― Henry Brooks Adams

“Good men do the most harm.”
― Henry Adams

“From cradle to grave this problem of running order through chaos, direction through space, discipline through freedom, unity through multiplicity, has always been, and must always be, the task of education, as it is the moral of religion, philosophy, science, art, politics and economy; but a boy's will is his life, and he dies when it is broken, as the colt dies in harness, taking a new nature in becoming tame...”
― Henry B. Adams

“The study of history is useful to the historian by teaching him his ignorance of women.”
― Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams

“The tourist was the great conservative who hated novelty and adored dirt.”
― Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams

“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.”
― Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams

“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.”
― Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams

“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”
― Henry Adams

“the problem of life was as simple as it was classic. Politics offered no difficulties, for there the moral law was a sure guide. Social perfection was also sure, because human nature worked for Good, and three instruments were all she asked — Suffrage, Common Schools, and Press. On these points doubt was forbidden. Education was divine, and man needed only a correct knowledge of facts to reach perfection:

"Were half the power that fills the world with terror, Were half the wealth bestowed on camps and courts, Given to redeem the human mind from error, There were no need of arsenals nor forts.”
― Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams

“Double standards are inspiration to men of letters, but they are apt to be fatal to politicians.”
― Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams

“In Paris and London he had seen nothing to make a return to life worth while; in Washington he saw plenty of reasons for staying dead.”
― Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams