Quotes from Henry Adams

The tourist was the great conservative who hated novelty and adored dirt.

The study of history is useful to the historian by teaching him his ignorance of women.

The habit of expression leads to the search for something to express. Something remains as a residuum of the commonplace itself, if one strikes out every commonplace in the expression.

In Paris and London he had seen nothing to make a return to life worth while; in Washington he saw plenty of reasons for staying dead.

Double standards are inspiration to men of letters, but they are apt to be fatal to politicians.

In practice, such trifles as contradictions in principle are easily set aside; the faculty of ignoring them makes the practical man.

For the first time in his life, Mont Blanc for a moment looked to him what it was - a chaos of anarchic and purposeless forces - and he needed days of repose to see it clothe itself again with the illusions of his senses, the white purity of its snows, the splendor of its light, and the infinity of its heavenly peace. Nature was kind; Lake Geneva was beautiful beyond itself, and the Alps put on charms real as terrors.

That the American, by temperament, worked to excess, was true; work and whiskey were his stimulants; work was a form of vice; but he never cared much for money or power after he earned them.

Nothing in education is so astonishing as the amount of ignorance it accumulates in the form of inert facts.

American art, like the American language and American education, was as far as possible sexless.

His brothers were the type; he was the variation.

Mathematicians practice absolute freedom.

One friend in a lifetime is much; two are many; three are hardly possible.