Henry Adams

“Seward would inspire a cow with statesmanship if she understood our language.”

“Double standards are inspiration to men of letters, but they are apt to be fatal to politicians.”

“The tourist was the great conservative who hated novelty and adored dirt.”

“He never labored so hard to learn a language as he did to hold his tongue, and it affected him for life. The habit of reticence — of talking without meaning — is never effaced.”

“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.”

“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.”

“In practice, such trifles as contradictions in principle are easily set aside; the faculty of ignoring them makes the practical man.”

“the problem of life was as simple as it was classic. Politics offered no difficulties, for there the moral law was a sure guide. Social perfection was also sure, because human nature worked for Good, and three instruments were all she asked — Suffrage, Common Schools, and Press. On these points doubt was forbidden. Education was divine, and man needed only a correct knowledge of facts to reach perfection: "Were half the power that fills the world with terror, Were half the wealth bestowed on camps and courts, Given to redeem the human mind from error, There were no need of arsenals nor forts.”

“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.”

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

“The Indian Summer of life should be a little sunny and a little sad, like the season, and infinite in wealth and depth of tone, but never hustled.”

“Unity is vision; it must have been part of the process of learning to see.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed. The imagination must be given not wings but weights.”

“Chaos was the law of nature; Order was the dream of man.”

“Philosophy . . .consists chiefly in suggesting unintelligible answers to insoluble problems.”

“In Paris and London he had seen nothing to make a return to life worth while; in Washington he saw plenty of reasons for staying dead.”

“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.”

“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.”

“General Grant seriously remarked to a particularly bright young woman that Venice would be a fine city if it were drained.”

“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.”

“A friend in power is a friend lost.”

“Friends are born, not made.”

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

“Good men do the most harm.”

“Of all studies, the one he would rather have avoided was that of his own mind. He knew no tragedy so heartrending as introspection.”

“These questions of taste, of feeling, of inheritance, need no settlement. Everyone carries his own inch-rule of taste, and amuses himself by applying it, triumphantly, wherever he travels.”

“Knowledge of human nature is the beginning and end of political education.”

“Chaos often breeds life, when order breeds habit.”

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

“A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops.”