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
travel taste inches
Everyone carries his own inch rule of taste, and amuses himself by applying it, triumphantly, wherever he travels.
inspirational leadership education
A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops.
dream nature men
Chaos was the law of nature; Order was the dream of man.
friendship true-friend two
One friend in a lifetime is much; two are many; three are hardly possible.
philosophy order medicine
Unity is vision; it must have been part of the process of learning to see.
teacher giving parent
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.
broken-heart broken-promises matter
At best, the renewal of broken relations is a nervous matter.
luxury morality ethics
Morality is a private and costly luxury.
rome years history
The great word Evolution had not yet, in 1860, made a new religion of history, but the old religion had preached the same doctrinefor a thousand years without finding in the entire history of Rome anything but flat contradiction.
travel mistake ignorance
The less a tourist knows, the fewer mistakes he need make, for he will not expect himself to explain ignorance.
marriage children men
The common view of marriage as a primitive institution implies in the man more than arbitrary superiority, such as he exercised over the child, which still remained free. The woman's slavery was assumed to be for life.
editing flesh pages
Every syllable that can be struck out is pure profit, and every page that can be economised is a five-per-cent dividend. Nature rebels against this rule; the flesh is weak, and shrinks from the scissors; I groan in retrospect over the weak.
love-is average perfect
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.
insane president firsts
Power is poison. Its effect on Presidents had always been tragic, chiefly as an almost insane excitement at first, and a worse reaction afterwards.