Henry Adams quotes - page 4

For reasons which many persons thought ridiculous, Mrs. Lightfoot Lee decided to pass the winter in Washington. (Henry Adams)
Politics are a very unsatisfactory game. View quote
Henry Adams
Any schoolboy could see that man as a force must be measured by motion, from a fixed point. View quote
Henry Adams
The progress of evolution from President Washington to President Grant was alone evidence to upset Darwin. View quote
Henry Adams
Power is poison. Its effect on Presidents had always been tragic. View quote
Henry Adams
The thirteenth century knew more about religion and decoration than the twentieth century will ever learn. View quote
Henry Adams
The scientific mind is atrophied, and suffers under inherited cerebral weakness, when it comes in contact with the eternal woman,- Astarte, Isis, Demeter, Aphrodite, and the last and greatest deity of all, the Virgin. View quote
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. View quote
Henry Adams
He had seen enough of the world to be a coward, and above all he had an uneasy distrust of bankers. Even dead men allow themselves a few narrow prejudices. View quote
Henry Adams
Among the unexpected revelations of human nature that suddenly astonish historians, one of the least reasonable was the passionate outburst of religious devotion to the ideal of feminine grace, charity and love that took place here in Normandy while it was still a part of the English kingdom, and flamed up into almost fanatical frenzy among the most hard-hearted and hard-headed race in Europe. View quote
Henry Adams
She was goddess because of her force; she was the animated dynamo; she was reproduction - the greatest and most mysterious of all energies; all she needed was to be fecund. (Henry Adams)
If the student got little from his mates, he got little more from his masters. The four years passed at college were, for his purposes, wasted. Harvard College was a good school, but at bottom what the boy disliked most was any school at all. He did not want to be one in a hundred - one per cent of an education. He regarded himself as the only person for whom his education had value, and he wanted the whole of it. View quote
Henry Adams
True artists, turned critics, think also less of rules than of values. View quote
Henry Adams
Thomas [...] could offer no proof of it, but he could assume as probable a plan of good which became the more perfect for the very reason that it allowed great liberty in detail. One hardly feels Saint Thomas here in all his force. He offers suggestion rather than proof;- apology, the weaker because of obvious effort to apologise, rather than defence, for infinite Goodness, Justice and Power; [...] but at all events society has never done better by way of proving its right to enforce morals, or unity of opinion. Unless it asserts law, it can only assert force. View quote
Henry Adams
The two men would have disliked each other by instinct had they lived in different planets. Each was created only for exasperating the other; the virtues of one were the faults of his rival, until no good quality seemed to remain of either. View quote
Henry Adams
Pascal touched God behind the veil of scepticism. View quote
Henry Adams
In that respect, and in that only, Charles Sumner was like him, but Sumner, in almost every other quality, was quite different from his three associates - altogether out of line. View quote
Henry Adams
He no longer cared whether he understood human nature or not; he understood quite as much as he wanted; but he found in the Life of Gladstone (II. 464) a remark several times repeated that gave him matter for curious thought. "I always hold," said Mr. Gladstone, "that politicians are the men whom, as a rule, it is most difficult to comprehend;" and he added, by way of strengthening it- "For my own part, I never have thus understood, or thought I understood, above one or two," View quote
Henry Adams
The whole Mount still kept the grand style; it expressed the unity of Church and State, God and Man, Peace and War, Life and Death, Good and Bad; it solved the whole problem of the universe. View quote
Henry Adams
Unity and Uniformity were the whole motive of philosophy, and if Darwin, like a true Englishman, preferred to back into it - to reach God a posteriori - rather than start from it, like Spinoza, the difference of method taught only the moral that the best way of reaching unity was to unite. Any road was good that arrived. View quote
Henry Adams
An artist, if good for anything, foresees what his public will see; and what his public will see is what he ought to have intended - the measure of his genius. If the public sees more than he himself did, this is his credit; if less, this is his fault. No matter how simple or ignorant we are, we ought to feel a discord or a harmony where the artist meant us to feel it, and when we see a motive, we conclude that other people have seen it before us, and that it must therefore have been intended. (Henry Adams)
Like so many other great observers, Langley was not a mathematician, and like most physicists, he believed in physics. Rigidly denying himself the amusement of philosophy, which consists chiefly in suggesting unintelligible answers to insoluble problems, he still knew the problems, and liked to wander past them in a courteous temper, even bowing to them distantly as though recognising their existence though doubting their respectability. View quote
Henry Adams
The idea that one has actually met a real genius dawns slowly on a Boston mind, but it made entry at last. View quote
Henry Adams
Material furnished by a government seldom satisfies critics or historians, for it lies always under suspicion. View quote
Henry Adams
...what struck boys most was their type. Senators were a species. View quote
Henry Adams