Henry Adams quotes - page 12

The work of internal government has become the task of controlling the thousands of fifth-rate men. (Henry Adams)
A period of about twelve years measured the beat of the pendulum. After the Declaration of Independence, twelve years had been needed to create an efficient Constitution; another twelve years of energy brought a reaction against the government then created; a third period of twelve years was ending in a sweep toward still greater energy; and already a child could calculate the result of a few more such returns. View quote
Henry Adams
Thank God, I never was cheerful. I come from the happy stock of the Mathers, who, as you remember, passed sweet mornings reflecting on the goodness of God and the damnation of infants. View quote
Henry Adams
I tell you the solemn truth, that the doctrine of the Trinity is not so difficult to accept for a working proposition as any one of the axioms of physics. View quote
Henry Adams
No man, however strong, can serve ten years as schoolmaster, priest, or Senator, and remain fit for anything else. All the dogmatic stations in life have the effect of fixing a certain stiffness of attitude forever, as though they mesmerised the subject. View quote
Henry Adams
We never despised the world or its opinions, we only failed to find out its existence. View quote
Henry Adams
Every individual that has existed or shall exist was created by the same instantaneous act, for all time. View quote
Henry Adams
Perhaps some day - say 1938, their centenary - they might be allowed to return together for a holiday, to see the mistakes of their own lives made clear in the light of the mistakes of their successors; and perhaps then, for the first time since man began his education among the carnivores, they would find a world that sensitive and timid natures could regard without a shudder. View quote
Henry Adams
This mental inertia of science lasted through the eighties before showing signs of breaking up; and nothing short of radium fairly wakened men to the fact, long since evident, that force was inexhaustible. View quote
Henry Adams
With the help of these two points of relation, he hoped to project his lines forward and backward indefinitely, subject to correction from any one who should know better. Thereupon, he sailed for home. View quote
Henry Adams
If a Unity exists, in which and towards which all energies centre, it must explain and include Duality, Diversity, Infinity,- Sex! (Henry Adams)
So little egoistic he was that none of his friends felt envy of his extraordinary superiority, but rather grovelled before it, so that women were jealous of the power he had over men; but women were many and Kings were one. The men worshipped not so much their friend, as the ideal American they all wanted to be. View quote
Henry Adams
Mankind could not admit an anarchical,- a dual or multiple - universe. The world was there, staring them in the face, with all its chaotic conditions, and society insisted on its Unity in self-defence. Society still insists on treating it as Unity though no longer affecting logic. View quote
Henry Adams
An economic civilisation troubles itself about the universe much as a hive of honey-bees troubles about the ocean, only as a region to be avoided. The hive of Saint Thomas sheltered God and Man, Mind and Matter, The Universe and the Atom, the One and the Multiple, within the walls of a harmonious home. View quote
Henry Adams
A period of about twelve years measured the beat of the pendulum. View quote
Henry Adams
The Abbey was the highest administrative creation of the middle ages. View quote
Henry Adams
God, as Descartes justly said, we know! but what is man? View quote
Henry Adams
He wills that some things shall be contingent and others necessary, but he wills in the same act that the contingency shall be necessary. View quote
Henry Adams
At the same time we had best try, as innocently as may be, to realise that no final judgement has yet been pronounced, either by the Church or by Society or by Science, on either or any of these points; and until mankind finally settles to a certainty where it means to go, or whether it means to go anywhere,- what its object is, or whether it has an object,- Saint Francis may still prove to have been its ultimate expression. In that case, his famous Chant,- the Cantico del Sole,- will be the last word of religion, as it was probably its first. View quote
Henry Adams
Creation was not successive; it was one instantaneous thought and act, identical with the will, and was complete and unchangeabble from end to end, including time as one of its functions. View quote
Henry Adams
Religious minds prefer scepticism. The true saint is a profound sceptic; a total disbeliever in human reason, who has more than once joined hands on this ground with some who were at best sinners. (Henry Adams)
Sumner was the boy's ideal of greatness; the highest product of nature and art. The only fault of such a model was its superiority which defied imitation. View quote
Henry Adams
The economic needs of a violently centralizing society forced the empire to enlarge its slave-system until the slave-system consumed itself and the empire too, leaving society no resource but further enlargement of its religious system in order to compensate for the losses and horrors of the failure. View quote
Henry Adams
In the same way he wills that his creation shall develop itself in time and space and sequence, but he creates these conditions as well as the events. He creates the whole, in one act, complete, unchangeable, and it is then unfolded like a rolling panorama with its predetermined contingencies. View quote
Henry Adams
We do not, and never can, know the twelfth-century woman, or, for that matter, any other woman. View quote
Henry Adams