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“As for the White House, all the boy's family had lived there, and, barring the eight years of Andrew Jackson's reign, had been more or less at home there ever since it was built. The boy half thought he owned it, and took for granted that he should some day live in it. He felt no sensation whatever before Presidents. A President was a matter of course in every respectable family; he had two in his own; three, if he counted old Nathaniel Gorham, who, was the oldest and first in distinction. Revolutionary patriots, or perhaps a Colonial Governor, might be worth talking about, but any one could be President, and some very shady characters were likely to be. Presidents, Senators, Congressmen, and such things were swarming in every street.”

Henry Adams

The Education of Henry Adams (1907)

“To his son Henry, the quality that distinguished his father from all the other figures in the family group, was that, in his opinion, Charles Francis Adams possessed the only perfectly balanced mind that ever existed in the name.”

Henry Adams

The Education of Henry Adams (1907)

“Some people are made with faith. I am made without it.”

Henry Adams

Esther Dudley in Ch. X
Esther: A Novel (1884)

“Our age has lost much of its ear for poetry, as it has its eye for color and line, and its taste for war and worship, wine and women.”

Henry Adams

Mont Saint Michel and Chartres (1904)

“Strange as the paradox seems, Saint Bernard and Lord Bacon, though looking at the world from opposite stand-points, agreed in this: that the scholastic method was false and mischievous, and that the longer it was followed, the greater was its mischief.”

Henry Adams

Mont Saint Michel and Chartres (1904)

“…the profoundest lessons are not the lessons of reason; they are sudden strains that permanentlywarp the mind.”

Henry Adams

The Education of Henry Adams (1907)

“The woman who is known only through a man is known wrong.”

Henry Adams

The Education of Henry Adams (1907)

“She broke in with a question that staggered him.
"Does your idea mean that the next world is a sort of great reservoir of truth, and that what is true in us just pours into it like raindrops?"
"Well!" said he, alarmed and puzzled: "the figure is not perfectly correct, but the idea is a little of that kind."
"After all I wonder whether that may not be what Niagara has been telling me!" said Esther, and she spoke with an outburst of energy that made Strong's blood run cold.”

Henry Adams

Esther Dudley and George Strong in Ch. IX
Esther: A Novel (1884)

“Even when, after centuries of license, the Church reformed its discipline, and, to prove it, burned Giordano Bruno in 1600, besides condemning Galileo in 1630 — as science goes on repeating to us every day — it condemned anarchists, not atheists. None of the astronomers were irreligious men; all of them made a point of magnifying God through his works; a form of science which did their religion no credit. Neither Galileo nor Kepler, neither Spinoza nor Descartes, neither Leibnitz nor Newton, any more than Constantine the Great — if so much — doubted Unity. The utmost range of their heresies reached only its personality.”

Henry Adams

The Education of Henry Adams (1907)

“"Do you really believe in the resurrection of the body?" she asked
"Of course I do!" replied Hazard stiffly.
"To me it seems a shocking idea. I despise and loathe myself, and yet you thrust self at me from every corner of the church as though I loved and admired it. All religion does nothing but pursue me with self even into the next world."”

Henry Adams

Esther Dudley and Stephen Hazard in Ch. X
Esther: A Novel (1884)

“The nineteenth century moved fast and furious, so that one who moved in it felt sometimes giddy, watching it spin; but the eleventh moved faster and more furiously still. The Norman conquest of England was an immense effort, and its consequences were far-reaching, but the first crusade was altogether the most interesting event in European history. Never has the western world shown anything like the energy and unity with which she then flung herself on the East, and for the moment made the East recoil. Barring her family quarrels, Europe was a unity then, in thought, will and object. Christianity was the unit.”

Henry Adams

Mont Saint Michel and Chartres (1904)

“The Trusts and Corporations stood for the larger part of the new power that had been created since 1840, and were obnoxious because of their vigorous and unscrupulous energy. They were revolutionary, troubling all the old conventions and values, as the screws of ocean steamers must trouble a school of herring. They tore society to pieces and trampled it under foot.”

Henry Adams

The Education of Henry Adams (1907)

“I know of nothing useful in life except what is beautiful or creates beauty.”

Henry Adams

Mr. Wharton in Ch. IV
Esther: A Novel (1884)

“The outburst of the first crusade was splendid even in a military sense, but it was great beyond comparison in its reflexion in architecture, ornament, poetry, color, religion and philosophy. Its men were astonishing, and its women were worth all the rest.”

Henry Adams

Mont Saint Michel and Chartres (1904)

“All the world had been at cross-purposes, had misunderstood themselves and the situation, had followed wrong paths, drawn wrong conclusions, and had known none of the facts. One would have done better to draw no conclusions at all. One's diplomatic education was a long mistake.”

Henry Adams

The Education of Henry Adams (1907)

“The effect of power and publicity on all men is the aggravation of self, a sort of tumor that ends by killing the victim's sympathies.”

Henry Adams

The Education of Henry Adams (1907)

“…by action on man all known force may be measured. Indeed, few men of science measured force in any other way. After once admitting that a straight line was the shortest distance between two points, no serious mathematician cared to deny anything that suited his convenience, and rejected no symbol, proved or unproveable, that helped him to accomplish work. The symbol was force, as a compass-needle or a triangle was force.”

Henry Adams

The Education of Henry Adams (1907)

“In time one came to recognize the type in other men, with differences and variations, as normal; men whose energies were the greater, the less they wasted on thought; men who sprang from the soil to power; apt to be distrustful of themselves and of others; shy; jealous; sometimes vindictive; more or less dull in outward appearance; always needing stimulants, but for whom action was the highest stimulant — the instinct of fight.”

Henry Adams

The Education of Henry Adams (1907)

“Unbroken Evolution under uniform conditions pleased every one — except curates and bishops; it was the very best substitute for religion; a safe, conservative practical, thoroughly Common-Law deity. Such a working system for the universe suited a young man who had just helped to waste five or ten thousand million dollars and a million lives, more or less, to enforce unity and uniformity on people who objected to it.”

Henry Adams

The Education of Henry Adams (1907)

“Like all great churches, that are not mere store-houses of theology, Chartres expressed, besides whatever else it meant, an emotion, the deepest man ever felt,— the struggle of his own littleness to grasp the infinite. You may, if you like, figure in it a mathematic formula of infinity,— the broken arch, our finite idea of space; the spire, pointing, with its converging lines, to Unity beyond space; the sleepless, restless thrust of the vaults, telling the unsatisfied, incomplete, overstrained effort of man to rival the energy, intelligence and purpose of God. Thomas Aquinas and the schoolmen tried to put it in words, but their church is another chapter. In act, all man's work ends there;— mathematics, physics, chemistry, dynamics, optics, every sort of machinery science may invent,— to this favor come at last, as religion and philosophy did before science was born.”

Henry Adams

Mont Saint Michel and Chartres (1904)