Henry Adams Quotes - Page 9

Quotes about:

• Teachers affect eternity; no one can tell where their influence stops.

  Henry Adams

  Teacher, Powerful, Influence

  4 Copy quote

• [After viewing the Palace of Electricity at the 1900 Trocadero Exposition in Paris]
  [Saint-Gaudens and Matthew Arnold] felt a railway train as power; yet they, and all other artists, constantly complained that the power embodied in a railway train could never be embodied in art. All the steam in the world could not, like the Virgin, build Chartres.

  Henry Adams

  Art, Paris, World

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• The photograph is a coarse fraud, and seems to delight only in taking the whole beauty out of the picture.

  Henry Adams

  Delight, Photograph, Coarse

  5 Copy quote

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

  Henry Adams

  Hate, Ideas, Imagination

  4 Copy quote

• Absolute liberty is absence of restraint; responsibility is restraint; therefore, the ideally free individual is responsible to himself.

  Henry Adams

  Responsibility, Liberty, Ignoring Facts

  Henry Adams (1986). “Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres”, p.30, Penguin

  10 Copy quote

• The American President resembles the commander of a ship at sea. He must have a helm to grasp, a course to steer, a port to seek.

  Henry Adams

  Sea, President, Ships

  28 Copy quote

• Man is an imperceptible atom always trying to become one with God.

  Henry Adams

  God, Men, Always Trying

  Henry Adams (1986). “Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres”, p.312, Penguin

  8 Copy quote

• Power is poison. Its effect on Presidents had always been tragic.

  Henry Adams

  Power, Political, President

  7 Copy quote

• One could not stay a month without loving the shabby town

  Henry Adams

  Months, Towns, Shabby

  4 Copy quote

• For after all man knows mighty little, and may some day learn enough of his own ignorance to fall down again and pray. Not that Icare. Only, if such is God's will, and Fate and Evolution--let there be God!

  Henry Adams

  God, Fall, Ignorance

  Henry Adams (1938). “Letters of Henry Adams ...: 1892-1918”, New York, Houghton

  4 Copy quote

• What a vast fraternity it is,--that of 'Hearts that Ache.' For the last three months it has seemed to me as though all society were coming to me, to drop its mask for a moment and initiate me into the mystery. How we do suffer! And we go on laughing; for, as a practical joke at our expense, life is a success.

  Henry Adams

  Heart, Grieving, Laughing

  Henry Adams, Jacob Claver Levenson, Massachusetts Historical Society (1982). “The Letters of Henry Adams: 1886-1892”

  4 Copy quote

• Politics are a very unsatisfactory game.

  Henry Adams

  Games, Political, Politics

  Henry Adams, Jacob Clavner Levenson, Massachusetts Historical Society (1982). “The Letters of Henry Adams: 1868-1885”

  9 Copy quote

• The progress of evolution from President Washington to President Grant was alone evidence to upset Darwin.

  Henry Adams

  Political, Upset, Progress

  The Education of Henry Adams ch. 17 (1907)

  12 Copy quote

• If Thought is capable of being classed with Electricity, or Will with chemical affinity, as a mode of motion, it seems necessary to fall at once under the second law of thermodynamics as one of the energies which most easily degrades itself, and, if not carefully guarded, returns bodily to the cheaper form called Heat. Of all possible theories, this is likely to prove the most fatal to Professors of History.

  Henry Adams

  Fall, Law, Return

  4 Copy quote

• 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. He must sooner or later be convinced that a perpetual calm is as little to his purpose as a perpetual hurricane, and that without headway the ship can arrive nowhere.

  Henry Adams

  Army, Sea, President

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