"No man, however strong, can serve ten years as schoolmaster, priest, or Senator, and remain fit for anything else."
Read quote
8 likes
Quote collection
Henry Adams quotes (page 4 of 11)
215 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"No man means all he says, and yet very few say all they mean, for words are slippery and thought is viscous."
Read quote
8 likes
"No man likes to have his intelligence or good faith questioned, especially if he has doubts about it himself."
Read quote
7 likes
"Modern politics is, at bottom, a struggle not of men but of forces. The men become every year more and more creatures of force, massed about central powerhouses. The conflict is no longer between the men, but between the motors that drive the men, and the men tend to succumb to their own motive forces."
Read quote
7 likes
"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."
Read quote
7 likes
"The chief wonder of education is that it does not ruin everybody concerned in it, teachers and taught."
Read quote
7 likes
"I am fairly tired--bored beyond endurance--by the world we live in, and its ideals, and am ready to say so, not violently, but kindly, as one rubs salt into the back of a flogged sailor as though one loved him."
Read quote
7 likes
"A parent gives life, but as parent, gives no more. A murderer takes life, but his deed stops there. A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops."
Read quote
7 likes
"He never labored so hard to learn a language as he did to hold his tongue, and it affected him for life. The habit of reticence — of talking without meaning — is never effaced."
Read quote
7 likes
"The social side of Washington was to be taken for granted as three-fourths of existence. Politics and reform became the detail, and waltzing the profession"
Read quote
7 likes
"Energy is the inherent effort of every multiplicity to become unity."
Read quote
7 likes
"Average human nature is very coarse, and its ideals must necessarily be average. The world never loved perfect poise. What the world does love is commonly absence of poise, for it has to be amused."
Read quote
7 likes
"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."
Read quote
7 likes
"Power when wielded by abnormal energy is the most serious of facts."
Read quote
7 likes
"Man is an imperceptible atom always trying to become one with God."
Read quote
7 likes
"Politics are a very unsatisfactory game."
Read quote
7 likes
"Politics is simply the organization of hatreds."
Read quote
7 likes
"The whole fabric of society will go to wrack if we really lay hands of reform on our rotten institutions. From top to bottom the whole system is a fraud, all of us know it, laborers and capitalists alike, and all of us are consenting parties to it."
Read quote
7 likes
"A congressman is a pig. The only way to get his snout from the trough is to rap it sharply with a stick."
Read quote
7 likes
"One does every day and without a second thought, what at another time would be the event of a year, perhaps of a life."
Read quote
6 likes