Famous Quotes by Henry Brooks Adams

  • Cold eyes ... steel grey, rather small, not unpleasant in good-humour, diabolic in a passion, but... More
  • There are two things that seem to be at the bottom of our constitutions; one is a continual... More
  • You seem to think that I am adapted to nothing but the sugar-plums of intellect and had better... More
  • The spring is here, young and beautiful as ever, and absolutely shocking in its display of... More
  • You may cut off the heads of every rich man now living—of every statesman—every literary, and... More
  • Thank God, I never was cheerful. I come from the happy stock of the Mathers, who, as you... More
  • As History stands, it is a sort of Chinese Play, without end and without lesson. More
  • For after all man knows mighty little, and may some day learn enough of his own ignorance to fall... More
  • The more I live here in western Europe, the more I am impressed by the sense of decay;Mnot the... More
  • My belief is that science is to wreck us, and that we are like monkeys monkeying with a loaded... More
  • As for America, it is the ideal fruit of all your youthful hopes and reforms. Everybody is fairly... More
  • American society is a sort of flat, fresh-water pond which absorbs silently, without reaction,... More
  • Ratcliffe was a great statesman. The smoothness of his manipulation was marvelous. No other man... More
  • A certain secret jealousy of the British Minister is always lurking in the breast of every... More
  • She atoned for want of devotion to God, by devotion to man. She had a woman’s natural tendency... More
  • It was this practical sense and cool will that won over Mrs. Lee, who was woman enough to assume... More
  • Of all things in life, Mrs. Lee held this kind of court-service in contempt, for she was... More
  • The American mind exasperated the European as a buzz-saw might exasperate a pine-forest. The... More
  • The preacher then went on to criticise the attitude of religion towards science. “If there is... More
  • “Poor Esther!” said he gloomily. “She has been brought up among men, and is not used to... More
  • Like most vigorous-minded men, seeing that there was no stopping-place between dogma and... More
  • The form of act or thought mattered nothing. The hymns of David, the plays of Shakespeare, the... More
  • Every man who has at last succeeded, after long effort, in calling up the divinity which lies... More
  • “To me it seems a shocking idea. I despise and loathe myself, and yet you thrust self at me... More
  • “If our minds could get hold of one abstract truth, they would be immortal so far as that truth... More
  • “I tell you the solemn truth that the doctrine of the Trinity is not so difficult to accept for... More
  • “You are bothered, I suppose, by the idea that you can’t possibly believe in miracles and... More
  • I shall not bring an automobile with me. These inventions infest France almost as much as Bloomer... More
  • What a vast fraternity it is,—that of ‘Hearts that Ache.’ For the last three months it has... More
  • To my fancy, one looks back on life, it has only two responsibilities, which include all the... More
  • In the history of the United States, there is no continuity at all. You can cut through it... More
  • My favorite figure of the American author is that of a man who breeds a favorite dog, which he... More
  • It’s a queer sensation, this secret belief that one stands on the brink of the world’s... More
  • My criticisms are always simple; they are limited to one word:MOmit! Every syllable that can be... More
  • The sensation of seeing extremely fine women, with superb forms, perfectly unconscious of... More
  • I am fairly tired—bored beyond endurance—by the world we live in, and its ideals, and am... More
  • The only human beings I have thoroughly admired and respected in the world have been those who... More
  • The American man is a very simple and cheap mechanism. The American woman I find a complicated... More
  • I am an anarchist in politics and an impressionist in art as well as a symbolist in literature.... More
  • As for piracy, I love to be pirated. It is the greatest compliment an author can have. The... More
  • Positively I sit here, and look at Europe sink, first one deck disappearing, then another, and... More
  • Silence alone is respectable and respected. I believe God to be silence. More
  • The spectacle [of American politics] resembles that of swarms of insects changing from worms to... More
  • What one really wants is youth, and what one really loses is years. Life becomes at last a mere... More
  • My idea is that the world outside—the so-called modern world—can only pervert and degrade the... More
  • ‘Society’ in America means all the honest, kindly-mannered, pleasant- voiced women, and all... More
  • It was the feeling of a passenger on an ocean steamer whose mind will not give him rest until he... More
  • What gave peculiar sanctity to numbers? Why were a million people, who all resembled each other,... More
  • The Virgin filled so enormous a space in the life and thought of the time that one stands now... More
  • The scientific mind is atrophied, and suffers under inherited cerebral weakness, when it comes in... More
  • In correct theology, the Virgin ought not to be represented in bed, for she could not suffer like... More
  • If it were worth while to argue a paradox, one might maintain that nature regards the female as... More
  • Dates are stupidly annoying—what we want is not dates but taste;Myet we are uncomfortable... More
  • Just as the French of the nineteenth century invested their surplus capital in a railway-system... More
  • An American Virgin would never dare command; an American Venus would never dare exist. More
  • The gothic is singular in this; one seems easily at home in the renaissance; one is not too... More
  • Unintelligible answers to insoluble problems. More
  • “If Washington were President now, he would have to learn our ways or lose his next election.... More
  • If Thought is capable of being classed with Electricity, or Will with chemical affinity, as a... More
  • Every reader of the French or German papers knows that not a day passes without producing some... More
  • Supposing the Mechanical Phase to have lasted 300 years, from 1600 to 1900, the next or Electric... More
  • Measured by any standard known to science—by horse-power, calories, volts, mass in any... More
  • Power is poison. Its effect on Presidents had always been tragic. More
  • A friend in power is a friend lost. More
  • Practical politics consists in ignoring facts. More
  • Politics, as a practise, whatever its professions, has always been the systematic organization of... More
  • The Woman had once been supreme; in France she still seemed potent, not merely as a sentiment but... More
  • Chaos often breeds life, when order breeds habit. More
  • One friend in a lifetime is much; two are many; three are hardly possible. Friendship needs a... More
  • Henry B. Adams was the first in an infinite series to discover and admit to himself that he... More
  • America had no use for Adams because he was eighteenth-century, and yet it worshipped Grant... More
  • Man always made, and still makes, grotesque blunders in selecting and measuring forces, taken at... More
  • Since [Rousseau’s] time, and largely thanks to him, the Ego has steadily tended to efface... More
  • The spider-mind acquires a faculty of memory, and, with it, a singular skill of analysis and... More
  • The great word Evolution had not yet, in 1860, made a new religion of history, but the old... More
  • One sought not absolute truth. One sought only a spool on which to wind the thread of history... More
  • From cradle to grave this problem of running order through chaos, direction through space,... More
  • Nothing in education is so astonishing as the amount of ignorance it accumulates in the form of... More
  • As he grew accustomed to the great gallery of machines, he began to feel the forty-foot dynamos... More
  • No European spring had shown him the same intermixture of delicate grace and passionate depravity... More
  • Chaos was the law of nature; Order was the dream of man. More
  • For the first time, the stage-scenery of the senses collapsed; the human mind felt itself... More
  • [The] elderly and timid single gentleman in Paris ... never drove down the Champs Elysees without... More
  • The outline of the city became frantic in its effort to explain something that defied meaning.... More
  • At the utmost, the active-minded young man should ask of his teacher only mastery of his tools.... More
  • He saw Mr. Lincoln but once; at the melancholy function called an Inaugural Ball. Of course he... More
  • “If she belongs to any besides the present, it is to the next world which artists want to see,... More
  • “Miss Dudley ... gives one the idea of a lightly-sparred yacht in mid- ocean; unexpected; you... More

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