Henry Adams Quotes

It is always good men who do the most harm in the world.

Intimates are predestined.

I tell you the solemn truth, that the doctrine of the Trinity is not so difficult to accept for a working proposition as any one of the axioms of physics.

I have written too much history to have faith in it; and if anyone thinks I'm wrong, I am inclined to agree with him.

He too serves a certain purpose who only stands and cheers.

Everyone carries his own inch rule of taste, and amuses himself by applying it, triumphantly, wherever he travels.

Every man who has at last succeeded, after long effort, in calling up the divinity which lies hidden in a woman's heart, is startled to find that he must obey the God he summoned.

American society is a sort of flat, fresh-water pond which absorbs silently, without reaction, anything which is thrown into it.

Accident counts for as much in companionship as in marriage.

A man must now swallow more belief than he can digest.

A friend in power is a friend lost.

There is no such thing as an underestimate of average intelligence.

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

The press is the hired agent of a monied system, and set up for no other purpose than to tell lies where their interests are involved. One can trust nobody and nothing.

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

At best, the renewal of broken relations is a nervous matter.

All experience is an arch, to build upon.

Some day science may have the existence of mankind in power, and the human race can commit suicide by blowing up the world.

I am an anarchist in politics and an impressionist in art as well as a symbolist in literature. Not that I understand what these terms mean, but I take them to be all merely synonyms of pessimist.

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

Chaos often breeds life, when order breeds habit.

Friends are born, not made.

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.

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. Friendship needs a certain parallelism of life, a community of thought, a rivalry of aim.