Henry Adams Quotes

“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

“A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops -Henry Adams”
― Mitch Albom, Tuesdays with Morrie: An Old Man, a Young Man, and Life's Greatest Lesson

“Men were, after all, not wholly inconsequent; their attachment to Mary rested on an instinct of self-preservation. They knew their own peril. If there was to be a future life, Mary was their only hope. She alone represented Love. The Trinity were, or was, One, and could, by the nature of its essence, administer justice alone. Only childlike illusion could expect a personal favour from Christ. Turn the dogma as one would, to this it must logically come. Call the three Godheads by what names one liked, still they must remain One; must administer one justice; must admit only one law. In that law, no human weakness or error could exist; by its essence it was infinite, eternal, immutable. There was no crack and no cranny in the system, through which human frailty could hope for escape. One was forced from corner to corner by a remorseless logic until one fell helpless at Mary's feet.

Without Mary, man had no hope except in atheism, and for atheism the world was not ready. Hemmed back on that side, men rushed like sheep to escape the butcher, and were driven to Mary; only too happy in finding protection and hope in a being who could understand the language they talked, and the excuses they had to offer.”
― Henry Adams

“But as we all know, rock ‘n’ roll will never die, and education too, as Henry Adams always sez, keeps going on forever.”
― Thomas Pynchon, Slow Learner

“Henry Adams, the reluctant tourist of 1860, pondering the forty-foot dynamos in the Great Exposition of 1900 in Paris, sensed with alarm their 'moral force, much as the early Christians felt the Cross.' He saw 'only an absolute fiat in electricity as in faith.' Physics was occupied with a 'supersensual world' of 'chance collisions' - physics was 'stark mad in metaphysics.' The pragmatic and human-scaled thinking that had sustained the fond narratives of nineteenth-century historians seemed feckless, disoriented.”
― Christopher S. Wood, A History of Art History