Henry Adams

All experience is an arch, to build upon.

— Henry Adams

They know enough who know how to learn.

— Henry Adams

Henry James chews more than he bites off.

— Henry Adams

Chaos breeds life; Order creates habit.

— Henry Adams

Intimates are predestined.

— Henry Adams

A friend in power is a friend lost.

— Henry Adams

The proper study of mankind is woman.

— Henry Adams

Mathematicians practice absolute freedom.

— Henry Adams

Energy is the inherent effort of every multiplicity to become unity.

— Henry Adams

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

— Henry Adams

The Jewish question is really the most serious of our problems.

— Henry Adams

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

— Henry Adams

“Life is a narrow valley, and the roads run close together”

— Henry Adams

A society in stable equilibrium is-by definition-one that has no history and wants no historians.

— Henry Adams

Modern politics is, at bottom, a struggle not of men but of forces.

— Henry Adams

Teachers affect eternity. There is no telling where their influence stops.

— Henry Adams

I think that Lee should have been hanged. It was all the worse that he was a good man and a fine…

— Henry Adams

A parent gives life, but as parent, gives no more. A murderer takes life, but his deed stops there. A teacher affects…

— Henry Adams

The Indian Summer of life should be a little sunny and a little sad, like the season, and infinite in wealth and…

— Henry Adams

No man, however strong, can serve ten years as schoolmaster, priest, or Senator, and remain fit for anything else.

— Henry Adams

Even theologians, even the great theologians of the thirteenth century, even Saint Thomas Aquinas himself did not trust to faith alone, or…

— Henry Adams

Power is poison. Its effect on Presidents had always been tragic, chiefly as an almost insane excitement at first, and a worse…

— Henry Adams

I hate photographs abstractly, because they have given me more ideas perversely and immovably wrong, than I ever should get by imagination.

— Henry Adams

Society is immoral and immortal; it can afford to commit any kind of folly, and indulge in any sort of vice; it…

— Henry Adams

The gothic is singular in this; one seems easily at home in the renaissance; one is not too strange in the Byzantine;…

— Henry Adams

“Charles Francis Adams was singular for mental poise — absence of self-assertion or self-consciousness — the faculty of standing apart without seeming…

— Henry Adams

The American man is a very simple and cheap mechanism. The American woman I find a complicated and expensive one. Contrasts of…

— Henry Adams

I firmly believe, that before many centuries more, science will be the master of man. The engines he will have invented will…

— Henry Adams

The scientific mind is atrophied, and suffers under inherited cerebral weakness, when it comes in contact with the eternal woman--Astarte, Isis, Demeter,…

— Henry Adams

The Virgin filled so enormous a space in the life and thought of the time that one stands now helpless before the…

— Henry Adams

[After viewing the Palace of Electricity at the 1900 Trocadero Exposition in Paris] [Saint-Gaudens and Matthew Arnold] felt a railway train as…

— 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…

— Henry Adams

“Evolution of mind was altogether another matter and belonged to another science, but whether one traced descent from the shark or the…

— Henry Adams

The first serious consciousness of Nature's gesture - her attitude towards life-took form then as a phantasm, a nightmare, all insanity of…

— Henry Adams

There have been times when the church seemed afraid, but she is no longer. Analyze, dissect, use your microscope or your spectrum…

— Henry Adams

“This education startled even a man who had dabbled in fifty educations all over the world; for, if he were obliged to…

— Henry Adams

After Gibbs, one the most distinguished [American scientists] was Langley, of the Smithsonian. ... He had the physicist's heinous fault of professing…

— Henry Adams

“Yet the press was still the last resource of the educated poor who could not be artists and would not be tutors.…

— Henry Adams

“Men were, after all, not wholly inconsequent; their attachment to Mary rested on an instinct of self-preservation. They knew their own peril.…

— Henry Adams

“For the first time in his life, Mont Blanc for a moment looked to him what it was - a chaos of…

— Henry Adams