Henry Adams - The Education of Henry Adams (1907)

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The work of internal government has become the task of controlling the thousands of fifth-rate 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
American art, like the American language and American education, was as far as possible sexless.

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

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

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

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

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

Henry Adams
No sand-blast of science had yet skimmed off the epidermis of history, thought, and feeling.

Henry Adams
The social side of Washington was to be taken for granted as three-fourths of existence. Politics and reform became the detail, and waltzing the profession

Henry Adams
Politics cannot stop to study psychology Its methods are rough; its judgments rougher still.

Henry Adams
The proof that a philosopher does not know what he is talking about is apt to sadden his followers before it reacts on himself.

Henry Adams
The Virgin filled so enormous a space in the life and thought of the time that one stands now helpless before the mass of testimony to her direct action and constant presence in every moment and form of the illusion which men thought they thought their existence.

Henry Adams
If the glacial period were uniformity, what was catastrophe?

Henry Adams
Had Grant been a Congressman one would have been on one's guard, for one knew the type. One never expected from a Congressman more than good intentions and public spirit. Newspaper-men as a rule had no great respect for the lower House; Senators had less; and Cabinet officers had none at all. Indeed, one day when Adams was pleading with a Cabinet officer for patience and tact in dealing with Representatives, the Secretary impatiently broke out: You can't use tact with a Congressman! A Congressman is a hog! You must take a stick and hit him on the snout!

Henry Adams
As a means of variation from a normal type, sickness in childhood ought to have a certain value not to be classed under any fitness or unfitness of natural selection; and especially scarlet fever affected boys seriously, both physically and in character, though they might through life puzzle themselves to decide whether it had fitted or unfitted them for success.

Henry Adams
Whatever was peculiar about him was education, not character, and came to him, directly and indirectly, as the result of that eighteenth-century inheritance which he took with his name.

Henry Adams
... the profoundest lessons are not the lessons of reason; they are sudden strains that permanentlywarp the mind.

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

Henry Adams
Society is immoral and immortal; it can afford to commit any kind of folly, and indulge in any sort of vice; it cannot be killed, and the fragments that survive can always laugh at the dead.

Henry Adams
Adams could no more interest Algernon Swinburne than he could interest Encke's comet. To Swinburne he could be no more than a worm. The quality of genius was an education almost ultimate, for one touched there the limits of the human mind on that side; but one could only receive; one had nothing to give — nothing even to offer.

Henry Adams
Friends are born, not made, and Henry never mistook a friend except when in power. From the first slight meeting in February and March, 1861, he recognized Hay as a friend, and never lost sight of him at the future crossing of their paths.

Henry Adams
In his fancy, office was poison; it killed — body and soul — physically and socially. Office was more poisonous than priestcraft or pedagogy in proportion as it held more power; but the poison he complained of was not ambition; he shared none of Cardinal Wolsey's belated penitence for that healthy stimulant, as he had shared none of the fruits; his poison was that of the will — the distortion of sight — the warping of mind — the degradation of tissue — the coarsening of taste — the narrowing of sympathy to the emotions of a caged rat.

Henry Adams
The American mind — the Bostonian as well as the Southern or Western — likes to walk straight up to its object, and assert or deny something that it takes for a fact; it has a conventional approach, a conventional analysis, and a conventional conclusion, as well as a conventional expression, all the time loudly asserting its unconventionality.

Henry Adams
The force of the Virgin was still felt at Lourdes, and seemed to be as potent as X-rays, but in America neither Venus nor Virgin ever had value as force — at most as sentiment.

Henry Adams
The throb of fifty or a hundred million steam horse-power, doubling every ten years, and already more despotic than all the horses that ever lived, and all the riders they ever carried, drowned rhyme and reason. No one was to blame, for all were equally servants of the power, and worked merely to increase it; but the conservative Christian anarchist saw light.

Henry Adams
Probably, since human society began, it had seen no such curious spectacle as the houses of the San Francisco millionaires on Nob Hill.

Henry Adams
Still another nightmare he suffered at a dance given by the old Duchess Dowager of Somerset, a terrible vision in castanets, who seized him and forced him to perform a Highland fling before the assembled nobility and gentry, with the daughter of the Turkish Ambassador for partner. This might seem humorous to some, but to him the world turned to ashes.

Henry Adams
The children reached manhood without knowing religion, and with the certainty that dogma, metaphysics, and abstract philosophy were not worth knowing. So one-sided an education could have been possible in no other country or time, but it became, almost of necessity, the more literary and political. As the children grew up, they exaggerated the literary and the political interests. They joined in the dinner-table discussions and from childhood the boys were accustomed to hear, almost every day, table-talk as good as they were ever likely to hear again. The eldest child, Louisa, was one of the most sparkling creatures her brother met in a long and varied experience of bright women.

Henry Adams