Henry Adams Quotes

344 Sourced Quotes

In correct theology, the Virgin ought not to be represented in bed, for she could not suffer like ordinary women, but her palace at Chartres is not much troubled by theology, and to her, as empress-mother, the pain of child-birth was a pleasure which she wanted her people to share.

Henry Adams
Thus results the plain assurance that the future of Thought, and therefore of History, lies in the hands of the physicists, and that the future historian must seek his education in the world of mathematical physics. Nothing can be expected from further study on the old lines.

Henry Adams
A science cannot be played with. If an hypothesis is advanced that obviously brings into direct sequence of cause and effect all the phenomena of human history, we must accept it, and if we accept it, we must teach it.

Henry Adams
Wild as man was, and disgusting as the more degraded tribes and communities were, the best of them, and all those from which further advance came, were marked by good qualities, or they could never have risen to a higher stage.

Henry Adams
For after all man knows mighty little, and may some day learn enough of his own ignorance to fall down again and pray. Not that Icare. Only, if such is God's will, and Fate and Evolution--let there be God!

Henry Adams
Any schoolboy could see that man as a force must be measured by motion, from a fixed point.

Henry Adams
There are two things that seem to be at the bottom of our constitutions; one is a continual tendency towards politics; the other is family pride; and it is strange how these two feelings run through all of us.

Henry Adams
My favorite figure of the American author is that of a man who breeds a favorite dog, which he throws into the Mississippi River for the pleasure of making a splash. The river does not splash, but it drowns the dog.

Henry Adams
The outline of the city became frantic in its effort to explain something that defied meaning. Power seemed to have outgrown its servitude and to have asserted its freedom. The cylinder had exploded, and thrown great masses of stone and steam against the sky.

Henry Adams
He had the physicist's heinous fault of professing to know nothing between flashes of intense perception.

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

Henry Adams
Every syllable that can be struck out is pure profit, and every page that can be economised is a five-per-cent dividend. Nature rebels against this rule; the flesh is weak, and shrinks from the scissors; I groan in retrospect over the weak.

Henry Adams
The easier study of geology... suited idle minds as well as though it were history.

Henry Adams
Briefly, chaos is all that science can logically assert of the supersensuous.

Henry Adams
You may cut off the heads of every rich man now living--of every statesman--every literary, and every scientific authority, without in the least changing the social situation. Artists, of course, disappeared long ago as social forces. So did the church. Corporations are not elevators, but levellers, as I see them.

Henry Adams
Society' in America means all the honest, kindly-mannered, pleasant- voiced women, and all the good, brave, unassuming men, between the Atlantic and the Pacific. Each of these has a free pass in every city and village, 'good for this generation only,' and it depends on each to make use of this pass or not as it may happen to suit his or her fancy.

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

Henry Adams
If our minds could get hold of one abstract truth, they would be immortal so far as that truth is concerned. My trouble is to find out how we can get hold of the truth at all.

Henry Adams
Man has mounted science, and is now run away with. I firmly believe that before many centuries more, science will be the master of men.

Henry Adams
The sensation of seeing extremely fine women, with superb forms, perfectly unconscious of undress, and yet evidently aware of their beauty and dignity, is worth a week's seasickness to experience.... To me the effect [of a Siva dance] was that of a dozen Rembrandts intensified into the most glowing beauty of life and motion.

Henry Adams
As for piracy, I love to be pirated. It is the greatest compliment an author can have. The wholesale piracy of Democracy was the single real triumph of my life. Anyone may steal what he likes from me.

Henry Adams
Whenever a man reaches the top of the political ladder, his enemies unite to pull him down. His friends become critical and exacting.

Henry Adams
The work of internal government has become the task of controlling the thousands of fifth-rate men.

Henry Adams
The spring is here, young and beautiful as ever, and absolutely shocking in its display of reckless maternity; but the Judas treewill bloom for you on the Bosphorus if you get there in time. No one ever loved the dog-wood and Judas tree as I have done, and it is my one crown of life to be sure that I am going to take them with me to heaven to enjoy real happiness with the Virgin and them.

Henry Adams
The facts seemed certain, or at least as certain as other facts; all they needed was explanation.

Henry Adams
My belief is that science is to wreck us, and that we are like monkeys monkeying with a loaded shell; we don't in the least know or care where our practically infinite energies come from or will bring us to.

Henry Adams
Mr Jefferson meant that the American system should be a democracy, and he would rather have let the whole world perish than that this principle, which to him represented all that man was worth, should fail. Mr Hamilton considered democracy a fatal curse, and meant to stop its progress.

Henry Adams
The bit of practical teaching he afterwards reviewed with most curiosity was the course in Chemistry, which taught him a number of theories that befogged his mind for a lifetime.

Henry Adams
Mathematicians assume the right to choose, within the limits of logical contradiction, what path they please in reaching their results.

Henry Adams
The new American, like the new European, was the servant of the powerhouse, as the European of the twelfth century was the servant of the Church.

Henry Adams