Henry Adams Quotes - Page 6

Only on the edge of the grave can man conclude anything.

Against them make ready your strength to the utmost of your power, including steeds of war, to strike terror into (the hearts of) the enemies, of Allah and your enemies, and others besides, whom ye may not know, but whom Allah doth know

If I grapple with sin in my own strength, the devil knows he may go to sleep.

Artists... disappeared long ago as social forces. So did the church.

Nothing is more tiresome than a superannuated pedagogue.

An American Virgin would never dare command; an American Venus would never dare exist.

The proof that a philosopher does not know what he is talking about is apt to sadden his followers before it reacts on himself.

To my fancy, one looks back on life, it has only two responsibilities, which include all the others: one is the bringing of new life into existence; the other, educating it after it is brought in. All betrayals of trust result from these original sins.

In the one branch he most needed

One sought not absolute truth. One sought only a spool on which to wind the thread of history without breaking it.

The Virgin filled so enormous a space in the life and thought of the time that one stands now helpless before the mass of testimony to her direct action and constant presence in every moment and form of the illusion which men thought they thought their existence.

It is impossible to underrate human intelligence - beginning with one's own.

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.

All taxation is an evil, but heavy taxes, indiscriminately levied on every everything are one of the greatest curses that can afflict a people

Church and State, Soul and Body, God and Man, are all one at Mont Saint Michel, and the business of all is to fight, each in his own way, or to stand guard for each other.

The spring is here, young and beautiful as ever, and absolutely shocking in its display of reckless maternity; but the Judas treewill bloom for you on the Bosphorus if you get there in time. No one ever loved the dog-wood and Judas tree as I have done, and it is my one crown of life to be sure that I am going to take them with me to heaven to enjoy real happiness with the Virgin and them.

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

The less a tourist knows, the fewer mistakes he need make, for he will not expect himself to explain ignorance.

The Woman had once been supreme; in France she still seemed potent, not merely as a sentiment but as a force; why was she unknownin America? for evidently America was ashamed of her, and she was ashamed of herself, otherwise they would not have strewn fig-leaves so profusely all over her. When she was a true force, she was ignorant of fig-leaves, but the monthly-magazine-made American female had not a feature that would have been recognized by Adam. The trait was notorious, and often humorous, but anyone brought up among Puritans knew that sex was sin. In any previous age, sex was strength.

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

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.

Good men do the most harm.

Susceptibility to the highest forces is the highest genius.

As history stands, it is a sort of Chinese play, without end andl without lesson. With these impressions I wrote the last line of my History, asking for a round century before going further.

A period of about twelve years measured the beat of the pendulum. After the Declaration of Independence, twelve years had been needed to create an efficient Constitution; another twelve years of energy brought a reaction against the government then created; a third period of twelve years was ending in a sweep toward still greater energy; and already a child could calculate the result of a few more such returns.