Henry Adams Quotes
Most popular Henry Adams Quotes
Chaos often breeds life, when order breeds habit.
Friends are born, not made.
A friend in power is a friend lost.
They know enough who know how to learn.
All experience is an arch to build upon.
Words are slippery and thought is viscous.
Man has mounted science; and is now run away.
They too serve a certain purpose who only stand and cheer.
No man means all he says, and yet very few say all they mean.
Young men have a passion for regarding their elders as senile.
Modern politics is, at bottom, a struggle not of men but of forces.
A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops.
One friend in a lifetime is much; two are many; three are hardly possible.
Knowledge of human nature is the beginning and the end of political education.
We combat obstacles in order to get repose, and, when got, the repose is unsupportable.
What one knows is, in youth, is of little moment; he knows enough who knows how to learn.
Analogies are figures intended to serve as fatal weapons if they succeed, and as innocent toys if they fail.
Some day science may have the existence of man in its power, and the human race may commit suicide by blowing up the world.
American society is a sort of flat, fresh-water pond which absorbs silently, without reaction, anything which is thrown into it.
The effect of power and publicity on all men is the aggravation of self, a sort of tumor that ends by killing the victim's sympathies.
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.
Power is poison. Its effect on Presidents had always been tragic, chiefly as an almost insane excitement at first, and a worse reaction afterwards.
The President may indeed in one respect resemble the commander of an army in peace, but in another and more essential sense he resembles the commander of a ship at sea. He must have a helm to grasp, a course to steer, a port to seek.
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.
All experience is an arch, to build upon.
One friend in a lifetime is much, two are many, three are hardly possible.
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.
