Accident counts for much in companionship, in marriage.
—Henry Adams
Topics: Friendship
Power is poison. It’s effect on Presidents had always been tragic.
—Henry Adams
There is no such thing as an underestimate of average intelligence.
—Henry Adams
Topics: Intelligence
The woman who is known only through a man is known wrong.
—Henry Adams
Topics: Men, Women, Men & Women, Men and Women
Morality is a private and costly luxury.
—Henry Adams
Topics: Morals, Opinions, Morality, Luxury
A friend in power is a friend lost.
—Henry Adams
Topics: Power, Authority
Accident counts for as much in companionship as in marriage.
—Henry Adams
Topics: Chance
Politics, as a practice, whatever its professions, has always been the systematic organization of hatreds.
—Henry Adams
Topics: Politicians, Politics
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.
—Henry Adams
Topics: Romance
Practical politics consists in ignoring facts.
—Henry Adams
Topics: Politicians, Politics
History will die if not irritated. The only service I can do to my profession is to serve as a flea.
—Henry Adams
Topics: History
What one knows is, in youth, of little moment; they know enough who know how to learn.
—Henry Adams
Topics: Education, Youth
In plain words, Chaos was the law of nature Order was the dream of man.
—Henry Adams
At best, the renewal of broken relations is a nervous matter.
—Henry Adams
In the one branch he most needed
—Henry Adams
Topics: Mathematics
No one means all he says, and yet very few say all they mean, for words are slippery and thought is viscous.
—Henry Adams
Topics: Writing, Words
The chief wonder of education is that it does not ruin everybody concerned in it, teachers and taught.
—Henry Adams
Topics: Education
History is the most aristocratic of all literary pursuits, because it obliges the historian to be rich as well as educated.
—Henry Adams
Topics: History
Man is an imperceptible atom always trying to become one with God.
—Henry Adams
Everyone carries his own inch rule of taste, and amuse himself by applying it, triumphantly, wherever he travels.
—Henry Adams
Topics: Style, Taste
Unintelligible answers to insoluble problems.
—Henry Adams
Topics: Philosophy, Science, Philosophers
No man likes to have his intelligence or good faith questioned, especially if he has doubts about it himself.
—Henry Adams
Topics: Intelligence, Doubt, Inferiority
The Indian summer of life should be a little sunny and sad, like the season, and infinite in wealth and depth of tone-but never hustled.
—Henry Adams
Topics: Aging
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
Topics: Friends and Friendship, Friendship
Nothing in education is so astonishing as the amount of ignorance it accumulates in the form of inert facts.
—Henry Adams
Topics: Intelligence, Ignorance, Facts, Education
He too serves a certain purpose who only stands and cheers.
—Henry Adams
Topics: Enthusiasm
American society is a sort of flat, fresh-water pond which absorbs silently, without reaction, anything which is thrown into it.
—Henry Adams
Topics: Society
A teacher affects eternity: he can never tell where his influence stops.
—Henry Adams
It is impossible to underrate human intelligence—beginning with one’s own.
—Henry Adams
Topics: Potential, Intelligence, Possibilities
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.
—Henry Adams
Topics: America
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
- Norman Mailer American Novelist, Journalist
- Samuel Eliot Morison American Historian
- James Harvey Robinson American Historian
- Theodore H. White American Journalist
- David McCullough American Historian
- W. E. B. Du Bois American Sociologist, Activist
- Daniel J. Boorstin American Historian
- Thomas Bailey Aldrich American Writer
- John Quincy Adams American Head of State
- William S. Burroughs American Novelist
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