"The less a tourist knows, the fewer mistakes he need make, for he will not expect himself to explain ignorance."
Read quote
3 likes
Quote collection
Henry Adams quotes (page 9 of 11)
215 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Wild as man was, and disgusting as the more degraded tribes and communities were, the best of them, and all those from which further advance came, were marked by good qualities, or they could never have risen to a higher stage."
Read quote
3 likes
"If any one of us has had an ambition higher than that of making money; a motive better than that of expediency; a faith warmer than that of reasoning; a love purer than that of the self; he has been slow to express it; still slower to urge it."
Read quote
3 likes
"Power is poison. Its effect on Presidents has been always tragic, chiefly as an almost indecent excitement at first, and a worse reaction afterwards; but also because no mind is so well balanced as to bear the strain of seizing unlimited force without habit or knowledge of it; and finding it disputed with him by hungry packs of wolves and hounds whose lives depend on snatching the carion."
Read quote
3 likes
"Charles Sumner's mind had reached the calm of WATER which receives and reflects images without absorbing them; it contains nothing but itself."
Read quote
3 likes
"It [love] is a disease to be born with patience, like any nervous complaint, and to be treated with counter-irritants."
Read quote
3 likes
"Laplace would have found it child's-play to fix a ratio of progression in mathematical science between Descartes, Leibnitz, Newton and himself"
Read quote
3 likes
"As History stands, it is a sort of Chinese Play, without end and without lesson."
Read quote
3 likes
"The spectacle [of American politics] resembles that of swarms of insects changing from worms to wings. They must get the wings ordie. For our salvation, Mr. Wilbur Wright is providing wings. He will also have to provide a new insect to use them."
Read quote
3 likes
"Artists... disappeared long ago as social forces. So did the church."
Read quote
3 likes
"No historian can take part with--or against--the forces he has to study. To him even the extinction of the human race should merely be a fact to be grouped with other vital statistics."
Read quote
3 likes
"Intimates are predestined."
Read quote
3 likes
"An artist's business is only to see."
Read quote
3 likes
"Nothing is more tiresome than a superannuated pedagogue."
Read quote
3 likes
"From earliest childhood the boy was accustomed to feel that, for him, life was double. Winter and summer, town and country, law and liberty, were hostile, and the man who pretended they were not, was in his eyes a schoolmaster -- that is, a man employed to tell lies to little boys."
Read quote
3 likes
"As a means of variation from a normal type, sickness in childhood ought to have a certain value not to be classed under any fitness or unfitness of natural selection; and especially scarlet fever affected boys seriously, both physically and in character, though they might through life puzzle themselves to decide whether it had fitted or unfitted them for success."
Read quote
3 likes
"The People of Virginia declare and make known that the powers granted under the Constitution being derived from the People of the United States may be resumed by them whensoever the same shall be perverted to their injury or oppression and that every."
Read quote
3 likes
"Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed. The imagination must be given not wings but weights."
Read quote
3 likes
"Those who seek education in the paths of duty are always deceived by the illusion that power in the hands of friends is an advantage to them."
Read quote
3 likes
"Every one must bear his own universe, and most persons are moderately interested in learning how their neighbors have managed to carry theirs."
Read quote
3 likes