"In the one branch he most needed"
Read quote
3 likes
Quote collection
Henry Adams quotes (page 10 of 11)
215 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Women have, commonly, a very positive moral sense; that which they will, is right; that which they reject, is wrong; and their will, in most cases, ends by settling the moral."
Read quote
3 likes
"Just as the French of the nineteenth century invested their surplus capital in a railway-system in the belief that they would makemoney by it in this life, in the thirteenth they trusted their money to the Queen of Heaven because of their belief in her power to repay it with interest in the life to come."
Read quote
3 likes
"History is only a value of relation."
Read quote
3 likes
"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."
Read quote
3 likes
"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."
Read quote
3 likes
"[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."
Read quote
3 likes
"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."
Read quote
3 likes
"If our minds could get hold of one abstract truth, they would be immortal so far as that truth is concerned. My trouble is to find out how we can get hold of the truth at all."
Read quote
3 likes
"One sought not absolute truth. One sought only a spool on which to wind the thread of history without breaking it."
Read quote
3 likes
"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."
Read quote
3 likes
"Mathematicians practice absolute freedom."
Read quote
3 likes
"There are two things that seem to be at the bottom of our constitutions; one is a continual tendency towards politics; the other is family pride; and it is strange how these two feelings run through all of us."
Read quote
3 likes
"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!"
Read quote
3 likes
"One could not stay a month without loving the shabby town"
Read quote
3 likes
"History is a tangled skein that one may take up at any point, and break when one has unravelled enough."
Read quote
3 likes
"I hate photographs abstractly, because they have given me more ideas perversely and immovably wrong, than I ever should get by imagination."
Read quote
3 likes
"Unbroken Evolution under uniform conditions pleased every one -- except curates and bishops; it was the very best substitute for religion; a safe, conservative practical, thoroughly Common-Law deity."
Read quote
3 likes
"History is the most aristocratic of all literary pursuits, because it obliges the historian to be rich as well as educated."
Read quote
3 likes
"An American Virgin would never dare command; an American Venus would never dare exist."
Read quote
3 likes