Quotes from Henry Adams

A parent gives life, but as parent, gives no more. A murderer takes life, but his deed stops there. A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops.

Teachers affect eternity. There is no telling where their influence stops.

Absolute liberty is absence of restraint; responsibility is restraint; therefore, the ideally free individual is responsible to himself.

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.

The world is coming to an end in 1950.

Susceptibility to the highest forces is the highest genius.

At best, the renewal of broken relations is a nervous matter.

We combat obstacles in order to get repose, and when got, the repose is insupportable.

The less a tourist knows, the fewer mistakes he need make, for he will not expect himself to explain ignorance.

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.

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.

It is impossible to underrate human intelligence - beginning with one's own.

Power is poison. Its effect on Presidents had always been tragic.

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.

We shall some day catch an abstract truth by the tail, and then we shall have our religion and our immortality.

No one means all he says and yet very few say all they mean.

Charles Francis Adams was singular for mental poise — absence of self-assertion or self-consciousness — the faculty of standing apart without seeming aware that he was alone — a balance of mind and temper that neither challenged nor avoided notice, nor admitted question of superiority or inferiority, of jealousy, of personal motives, from any source, even under great pressure.

The first serious consciousness of Nature's gesture - her attitude towards life-took form then as a phantasm, a nightmare, all insanity of force. For the first time, the stage-scenery of the senses collapsed; the human mind felt itself stripped naked, vibrating in a void of shapeless energies, with resistless mass, colliding, crushing, wasting, and destroying what these same energies had created and labored from eternity to perfect.

General Grant seriously remarked to a particularly bright young woman that Venice would be a fine city if it were drained.

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

Everyone must bear his own universe, and most persons are moderately interested in learning how their neighbors have managed to carry theirs.

Politics, as a practice, whatever its professions, has always been the systematic organization of hatreds.

I think [Robert E.] Lee should have been hanged. It was all the worse that he was a good man, had a good character, and acted conscientiously. It's always the good men who do the most harm.

When one thinks what one leaves in the world when one dies, Only silence is strong, - all the rest is but lies.