"A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops."
"As for America, it is the ideal fruit of all your youthful hopes and reforms. Everybody is fairly decent, respectable, domestic, bourgeois, middle-class, and tiresome. There is absolutely nothing to revile except that it's a bore."
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Source: Henry Adams, Jacob Clavner Levenson, Ernest Samuels, Charles Vandersee (1982). “The Letters of Henry Adams”, p.200, Harvard University Press
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"All experience is an arch, to build upon."
"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."
"One friend in a life-time is much; two are many; three are hardly possible. Friendship needs a certain parallelism of life, a community of thought, a rivalry of aim."
"Chaos was the law of nature; Order was the dream of man."
"[regarding US conquest of the Philippines] I turn green in bed at midnight if I think of the horror of a year's warfare in the Philippines ... We must slaughter a million or two foolish Malays in order to give them the comforts of flannel petticoats and electric railways."