Henry Adams
Henry Adams
Henry Brooks Adamswas an American historian and member of the Adams political family, being descended from two U.S. Presidents...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth16 February 1838
CityBoston, MA
CountryUnited States of America
Henry Adams quotes about
talking tongue language
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.
mind tragedy study
Of all studies, the one he would rather have avoided was that of his own mind. He knew no tragedy so heartrending as introspection.
history relation values
History is only a value of relation.
friendship men should-have
Every man should have a fair-sized cemetary in which to bury the faults of his friends.
teacher influence eternity
Teachers affect eternity; no one can tell where their influence stops.
effort unity energy
Energy is the inherent effort of every multiplicity to become unity.
moon squares liberty
[P]olitical and social and scientific values ... should be correlated in some relation of movement that could be expressed in mathematics, nor did one care in the least that all the world said it could not be done, or that one knew not enough mathematics even to figure a formula beyond the schoolboy s=(1/2)gt2. If Kepler and Newton could take liberties with the sun and moon, an obscure person ... could take liberties with Congress, and venture to multiply its attraction into the square of its time. He had only to find a value, even infinitesimal, for its attraction.
musician mathematics mathematician
[Adams] supposed that, except musicians, everyone thought Beethoven a bore, as every one except mathematicians thought mathematics a bore.
children play ratios
Laplace would have found it child's-play to fix a ratio of progression in mathematical science between Descartes, Leibnitz, Newton and himself
philosophy knowledge past
After Gibbs, one the most distinguished [American scientists] was Langley, of the Smithsonian. ... He had the physicist's heinous fault of professing to know nothing between flashes of intense perception. ... Rigidly denying himself the amusement of philosophy, which consists chiefly in suggesting unintelligible answers to insoluble problems, and liked to wander past them in a courteous temper, even bowing to them distantly as though recognizing their existence, while doubting their respectibility.
bullying facts serious
Power when wielded by abnormal energy is the most serious of facts.
wings imagination weight
Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed. The imagination must be given not wings but weights.
philosophy answers problem
[P]hilosophy . . .consists chiefly in suggesting unintelligible answers to insoluble problems.
years two bird
A new friend is always a miracle, but at thirty-three years old, such a bird of paradise rising in the sage-brush was an avatar. One friend in a lifetime is much; two are many; three are hardly