Quotes by Henry Adams

• Chaos often breeds life when order breeds habit.
• No one means all he says, and yet very few say all they mean, for words are slippery and thought is viscous.
• 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.
• A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops.
• I have written too much history to have faith in it; and if anyone thinks I'm wrong, I am inclined to agree with him.
• Man is an imperceptible atom always trying to become one with God.
• 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.
• Young men have a passion for regarding their elders as senile.
• Only on the edge of the grave can man conclude anything.
• We combat obstacles in order to get repose, and when got, the repose is insupportable.
• Politics are a very unsatisfactory game.
• Power is poison. Its effect on Presidents had always been tragic.
• Power when wielded by abnormal energy is the most serious of facts.
• Practical politics consists in ignoring facts.
• Simplicity is the most deceitful mistress that ever betrayed man.
• The American President resembles the commander of a ship at sea. He must have a helm to grasp, a course to steer, a port to seek.
• The effect of power and publicity on all men is the aggravation of self, a sort of tumor that ends by killing the victim's sympathies.
• The press is the hired agent of a monied system, and set up for no other purpose than to tell lies where their interests are involved. One can trust nobody and nothing.
• The progress of evolution from President Washington to President Grant was alone evidence to upset Darwin.
• The proper study of mankind is woman.
• The woman who is known only through a man is known wrong.
• There is no such thing as an underestimate of average intelligence.
• They know enough who know how to learn.
• 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.
• Nothing in education is so astonishing as the amount of ignorance it accumulates in the form of inert facts.
• Susceptibility to the highest forces is the highest genius.
• Chaos often breeds life, when order breeds habit.
• No man, however strong, can serve ten years as schoolmaster, priest, or Senator, and remain fit for anything else.
• A friend in power is a friend lost.
• A teacher affects eternity he can never tell, where his influence stops.
• Absolute liberty is absence of restraint; responsibility is restraint; therefore, the ideally free individual is responsible to himself.
• Accident counts for as much in companionship as in marriage.
• All experience is an arch, to build upon.
• Philosophy: Unintelligible answers to insoluble problems.
• At best, the renewal of broken relations is a nervous matter.
• Chaos was the law of nature; Order was the dream of man.
• Knowledge of human nature is the beginning and end of political education.
• No man means all he says, and yet very few say all they mean, for words are slippery and thought is viscous.
• American society is a sort of flat, fresh-water pond which absorbs silently, without reaction, anything which is thrown into it.
• Morality is a private and costly luxury.
• Everyone carries his own inch rule of taste, and amuses himself by applying it, triumphantly, wherever he travels.
• It is impossible to underrate human intelligence - beginning with one's own.
• It is always good men who do the most harm in the world.
• Intimates are predestined.
• He too serves a certain purpose who only stands and cheers.
• Friends are born, not made.
• No man likes to have his intelligence or good faith questioned, especially if he has doubts about it himself.
• Every man who has at last succeeded, after long effort, in calling up the divinity which lies hidden in a woman's heart, is startled to find that he must obey the God he summoned.
• Politics... have always been the systematic organization of hatreds.
• One friend in a lifetime is much; two are many; three hardly possible.
• A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell, where his influence stops.
• A man must now swallow more belief than he can digest.
• I am an anarchist in politics and an impressionist in art as well as a symbolist in literature. Not that I understand what these terms mean, but I take them to be all merely synonyms of pessimist.
• 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.