Quotes from Henry Adams

As for America, it is the ideal fruit of all your youthful hopes and reforms. Everybody is fairly decent, respectable, domestic, bourgeois, middle-class, and tiresome. There is absolutely nothing to revile except that it's a bore.

Everyone carries his own inch rule of taste, and amuse himself by applying it, triumphantly, wherever he travels.

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

The best date movies give you something to talk about. A movie that's a downer is a great way to find out about someone.

Whatever happens at all happens as it should thou wilt find this true, if thou shouldst watch closely.

You say that love is nonsense....I tell you it is no such thing. For weeks and months it is a steady physical pain, an ache about the heart, never leaving one, by night or by day a long strain on one's nerves like toothache or rheumatism, not intolerable at any one instant, but exhausting by its steady drain on the strength.

Chaos often breeds life, when order breeds habit.

A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops.

Chaos was the law of nature; Order was the dream of man.

No man means all he says, and yet very few say all they mean, for words are slippery and thought is viscous.

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.

Unity is vision; it must have been part of the process of learning to see.

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.

The chief wonder of education is that it does not ruin everybody concerned in it, teachers and taught.

A friend in power is a friend lost.

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.

He never labored so hard to learn a language as he did to hold his tongue, and it affected him for life. The habit of reticence — of talking without meaning — is never effaced.

Knowledge of human nature is the beginning and end of political education.

Of all studies, the one he would rather have avoided was that of his own mind. He knew no tragedy so heartrending as introspection.

These questions of taste, of feeling, of inheritance, need no settlement. Everyone carries his own inch-rule of taste, and amuses himself by applying it, triumphantly, wherever he travels.

Philosophy . . .consists chiefly in suggesting unintelligible answers to insoluble problems.

Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed. The imagination must be given not wings but weights.

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.

Good men do the most harm.