Henry Adams quotes - page 2

The proper study of mankind is woman. (Henry Adams)
Only on the edge of the grave can man conclude anything.
Henry Adams
At best, the renewal of broken relations is a nervous matter.
Henry Adams
There is no such thing as an underestimate of average intelligence.
Henry Adams
Society is immoral and immortal; it can afford to commit any kind of folly, and indulge in any sort of vice; it cannot be killed, and the fragments that survive can always laugh at the dead.
Henry Adams
Man had in the beginning no power of analysis or synthesis approaching that of the spider, or even of the honey-bee; he had acute sensibility to the higher forces. Fire taught him secrets that no other animal could learn; running water probably taught him even more, especially in his first lessons of mechanics; the animals helped to educate him, trusting themselves into his hands merely for the sake of their food, and carrying his burdens or supplying his clothing; the grasses and grains were academies of study.
Henry Adams
The chief wonder of education is that it does not ruin everybody concerned in it, teachers and taught.
Henry Adams
Every one who marries goes it blind, more or less.
Henry Adams
Average human nature is very coarse, and its ideals must necessarily be average. The world never loved perfect poise. What the world does love is commonly absence of poise, for it has to be amused.
Henry Adams
As a means of variation from a normal type, sickness in childhood ought to have a certain value not to be classed under any fitness or unfitness of natural selection; and especially scarlet fever affected boys seriously, both physically and in character, though they might through life puzzle themselves to decide whether it had fitted or unfitted them for success.
Henry Adams
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. (Henry Adams)
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.
Henry Adams
Man is an imperceptible atom always trying to become one with God.
Henry Adams
The mind resorts to reason for want of training.
Henry Adams
Politics, as a practice, whatever its professions, had always been the systematic organization of hatreds.
Henry Adams
No honest historian can take part with - or against - the forces he has to study. To him even the extinction of the human race should be merely a fact to be grouped with other vital statistics.
Henry Adams
From earliest childhood the boy was accustomed to feel that, for him, life was double. Winter and summer, town and country, law and liberty, were hostile, and the man who pretended they were not, was in his eyes a schoolmaster - that is, a man employed to tell lies to little boys.
Henry Adams
...analogies [...] are figures intended to serve as fatal weapons if they succeed, and as innocent toys if they fail.
Henry Adams
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.
Henry Adams
Modern politics is, at bottom, a struggle not of men but of forces. The men become every year more and more creatures of force, massed about central powerhouses. The conflict is no longer between the men, but between the motors that drive the men, and the men tend to succumb to their own motive forces.
Henry Adams
...the outpourings of Elisée Reclus were ideals of the French ouvrier, diluted with absinthe, resulting in a bourgeois dream of order and inertia. Neither made a pretence of anarchy except as a momentary stage towards order and unity. Neither of them had formed any other conception of the universe than what they had inherited from the priestly class to which their minds obviously belonged. With them, as with the socialist, communist, or collectivist, the mind that followed nature had no relation. (Henry Adams)
Adams could no more interest Algernon Swinburne than he could interest Encke's comet. To Swinburne he could be no more than a worm. The quality of genius was an education almost ultimate, for one touched there the limits of the human mind on that side; but one could only receive; one had nothing to give - nothing even to offer.
Henry Adams
There as elsewhere a cruel universe combined to crush a child. As though three or four vigorous brothers and sisters, with the best will, were not enough to crush any child, every one else conspired towards an education which he hated. 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. Rarely has the boy felt kindly towards his tamers. Between him and his master has always been war. Henry Adams never knew a boy of his generation to like a master, and the task of remaining on friendly terms with one's own family, in such a relation, was never easy.
Henry Adams
...not one rebel defection - not even Robert E. Lee's - cost young Adams a personal pang; but Sumner's struck home.
Henry Adams
Books remained as in the eighteenth century, the source of life, and as they came out - Thackeray, Dickens, Bulwer, Tennyson, Macaulay, Carlyle, and the rest - they were devoured; but as far as happiness went, the happiest hours of the boy's education were passed in summer lying on a musty heap of Congressional Documents in the old farmhouse at Quincy, reading "Quentin Durward," "Ivanhoe," and "The Talisman," and raiding the garden at intervals for peaches and pears. On the whole he learned most then.
Henry Adams