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Henry Adams QUOTES

Henry Adams QUOTES

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

― Henry Adams , La educación de Henry Adams

2 " 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. "

― Henry Adams , La educación de Henry Adams

3 " 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. "

― Henry Adams , La educación de Henry Adams

4 " 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. "

― Henry Adams , La educación de Henry Adams

5 " Good men do the most harm. "

― Henry Adams

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

― Henry Adams , La educación de Henry Adams

7 " The habit of looking at life as a social relation — an affair of society — did no good. It cultivated a weakness which needed no cultivation. If it had helped to make men of the world, or give the manners and instincts of any profession — such as temper, patience, courtesy, or a faculty of profiting by the social defects of opponents — it would have been education better worth having than mathematics or languages; but so far as it helped to make anything, it helped only to make the college standard permanent through life. "

― Henry Adams , La educación de Henry Adams

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

― Henry Adams , La educación de Henry Adams

9 " A friend in power is a friend lost. "

― Henry Adams , La educación de Henry Adams

10 " 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. "

― Henry Adams , La educación de Henry Adams

11 " A new friend is always a miracle...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. "

― Henry Adams , La educación de Henry Adams

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

― Henry Adams , La educación de Henry Adams

13 " 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. "

― Henry Adams , La educación de Henry Adams

14 " He supposed that, except musicians, every one thought Beethoven a bore, as every one except mathematicians thought mathematics a bore. "

― Henry Adams , La educación de Henry Adams

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

― Henry Adams , La educación de Henry Adams

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

― Henry Adams , La educación de Henry Adams

17 " 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. "

― Henry Adams , La educación de Henry Adams

18 " I, too, like yourself was a good party man: my party was that of the Church; I was ultramontane. Your party system is one of your thefts from our Church; your National Convention is our Ecunemic Council; you abdicate reason, as we do, before its decisions; and you yourself Mr. Ratcliffe, you are a Cardinal. "

― Henry Adams , Democracy: An American Novel

19 " From cradle to grave this problem of running order through chaos, direction through space, discipline through freedom, unity through multiplicity, has always been, and must always be, the task of education, as it is the moral of religion, philosophy, science, art, politics and economy; but a boy's will is his life, and he dies when it is broken, as the colt dies in harness, taking a new nature in becoming tame... "

― Henry Adams

20 " 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. "

― Henry Adams , La educación de Henry Adams