Henry Adams
One sought not absolute truth. One sought only a spool on which to wind the thread of history without breaking it.Collection: Truth
Nothing is more tiresome than a superannuated pedagogue.Collection: Teaching
An American Virgin would never dare command; an American Venus would never dare exist.Collection: Venus
The Virgin filled so enormous a space in the life and thought of the time that one stands now helpless before the mass of testimony to her direct action and constant presence in every moment and form of the illusion which men thought they thought their existence.Collection: Men
To my fancy, one looks back on life, it has only two responsibilities, which include all the others: one is the bringing of new life into existence; the other, educating it after it is brought in. All betrayals of trust result from these original sins.Collection: Life
Artists... disappeared long ago as social forces. So did the church.Collection: Artist
In the one branch he most neededCollection: Math
The proof that a philosopher does not know what he is talking about is apt to sadden his followers before it reacts on himself.Collection: Talking
The habit of expression leads to the search for something to express. Something remains as a residuum of the commonplace itself, if one strikes out every commonplace in the expression.Collection: Expression
All taxation is an evil, but heavy taxes, indiscriminately levied on every everything are one of the greatest curses that can afflict a peopleCollection: People
Church and State, Soul and Body, God and Man, are all one at Mont Saint Michel, and the business of all is to fight, each in his own way, or to stand guard for each other.Collection: Fighting
The spring is here, young and beautiful as ever, and absolutely shocking in its display of reckless maternity; but the Judas treewill bloom for you on the Bosphorus if you get there in time. No one ever loved the dog-wood and Judas tree as I have done, and it is my one crown of life to be sure that I am going to take them with me to heaven to enjoy real happiness with the Virgin and them.Collection: Beautiful
The tourist was the great conservative who hated novelty and adored dirt.Collection: Travel
The less a tourist knows, the fewer mistakes he need make, for he will not expect himself to explain ignorance.Collection: Travel
Teachers affect eternity. There is no telling where their influence stops.Collection: Teacher
A society in stable equilibrium is-by definition-one that has no history and wants no historians.Collection: History
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.Collection: Philosophy
Teachers affect eternity; no one can tell where their influence stops.Collection: Teacher
The photograph is a coarse fraud, and seems to delight only in taking the whole beauty out of the picture.Collection: Delight
I hate photographs abstractly, because they have given me more ideas perversely and immovably wrong, than I ever should get by imagination.Collection: Hate
One could not stay a month without loving the shabby townCollection: Months
For after all man knows mighty little, and may some day learn enough of his own ignorance to fall down again and pray. Not that Icare. Only, if such is God's will, and Fate and Evolution--let there be God!Collection: God
What a vast fraternity it is,--that of 'Hearts that Ache.' For the last three months it has seemed to me as though all society were coming to me, to drop its mask for a moment and initiate me into the mystery. How we do suffer! And we go on laughing; for, as a practical joke at our expense, life is a success.Collection: Heart
If Thought is capable of being classed with Electricity, or Will with chemical affinity, as a mode of motion, it seems necessary to fall at once under the second law of thermodynamics as one of the energies which most easily degrades itself, and, if not carefully guarded, returns bodily to the cheaper form called Heat. Of all possible theories, this is likely to prove the most fatal to Professors of History.Collection: Fall
The President may indeed in one respect resemble the commander of an army in peace, but in another and more essential sense he resembles the commander of a ship at sea. He must have a helm to grasp, a course to steer, a port to seek. He must sooner or later be convinced that a perpetual calm is as little to his purpose as a perpetual hurricane, and that without headway the ship can arrive nowhere.Collection: Army
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.Collection: Marriage
His brothers were the type; he was the variation.Collection: Family
Women have, commonly, a very positive moral sense; that which they will, is right; that which they reject, is wrong; and their will, in most cases, ends by settling the moral.Collection: Women
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.Collection: Race
Education should try to lessen the obstacles, diminish the friction, invigorate the energy, and should train minds to react, not at haphazard, but by choice, on the lines of force that attract their world. What one knows is, in youth, of little moment; they know enough who know how to learn.Collection: Education
The study of history is useful to the historian by teaching him his ignorance of women.Collection: Teaching
Society' in America means all the honest, kindly-mannered, pleasant- voiced women, and all the good, brave, unassuming men, between the Atlantic and the Pacific. Each of these has a free pass in every city and village, 'good for this generation only,' and it depends on each to make use of this pass or not as it may happen to suit his or her fancy.Collection: Mean
My favorite figure of the American author is that of a man who breeds a favorite dog, which he throws into the Mississippi River for the pleasure of making a splash. The river does not splash, but it drowns the dog.Collection: Dog
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.Collection: Editing
All State education is a sort of dynamo machine for polarizing the popular mind; for turning and holding its lines of force in the direction supposed to be most effective for State purposes.Collection: Education
Every one must bear his own universe, and most persons are moderately interested in learning how their neighbors have managed to carry theirs.Collection: Friendship
History is a tangled skein that one may take up at any point, and break when one has unravelled enough.Collection: Tangled
American art, like the American language and American education, was as far as possible sexless.Collection: Art
No man, however strong, can serve ten years as schoolmaster, priest, or Senator, and remain fit for anything else. All the dogmatic stations in life have the effect of fixing a certain stiffness of attitude forever, as though they mesmerised the subject.Collection: Strong
The scientific mind is atrophied, and suffers under inherited cerebral weakness, when it comes in contact with the eternal woman--Astarte, Isis, Demeter, Aphrodite, and the last and greatest deity of all, the Virgin.Collection: Women
Any schoolboy could see that man as a force must be measured by motion, from a fixed point.Collection: Men
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.Collection: Character
There are two things that seem to be at the bottom of our constitutions; one is a continual tendency towards politics; the other is family pride; and it is strange how these two feelings run through all of us.Collection: Running
American politics is a struggle, not of men but of forces. The men become every year more and more creatures of force, massed about central power houses.Collection: Struggle
Laplace would have found it child's-play to fix a ratio of progression in mathematical science between Descartes, Leibnitz, Newton and himselfCollection: Children
Mathematicians practice absolute freedom.Collection: Practice
As a historian, he felt it his duty to respect everything that had ever been respected, except for the occasional statesman.Collection: Political
Nothing is easier than to teach historical method, but, when learned, it has little use.Collection: History