Henry Adams: Evening

Henry Adams was journalist, historian, academic, novelist. Explore interesting quotes on evening.

Henry Adams: 622 quotes6 likes

“He had seen enough of the world to be a coward, and above all he had an uneasy distrust of bankers. Even dead men allow themselves a few narrow prejudices.”

The Education of Henry Adams (1907)

“Like so many other great observers, Langley was not a mathematician, and like most physicists, he believed in physics. Rigidly denying himself the amusement of philosophy, which consists chiefly in suggesting unintelligible answers to insoluble problems, he still knew the problems, and liked to wander past them in a courteous temper, even bowing to them distantly as though recognising their existence though doubting their respectability.”

The Education of Henry Adams (1907)

“Abélard would find most of his old problems sensitive to his touch today. Time has settled few or none of the essential points of dispute. Science hesitates, more visibly than the Church ever did, to decide once for all whether Unity or Diversity is ultimate law; whether order or chaos is the governing rule of the Universe, if Universe there is; whether anything except phenomena exists. Even in matters more vital to society, one dares not speak too loud. Why, and for what, and to whom, is man a responsible agent? Every jury and judge, every lawyer and doctor, every legislator and clergyman has his own views, and the law constantly varies. Every nation may have a different system. One court may hang, and another may acquit for the same crime, on the same day; and Science only repeats what the Church said to Abélard, that where we know so little, we had better hold our tongues.”

Mont Saint Michel and Chartres (1904)

“Adams could no more interest Algernon Swinburne than he could interest Encke's comet. To Swinburne he could be no more than a worm. The quality of genius was an education almost ultimate, for one touched there the limits of the human mind on that side; but one could only receive; one had nothing to give — nothing even to offer.”

The Education of Henry Adams (1907)

“… the affectation of readiness for death is a stage rôle, and stoicism is a stupid resource though the only one. Non dolet, Pæte! One is ashamed of it even in the acting.”

The Education of Henry Adams (1907)

“…no number of centuries could ever educate him to Swinburne's level, even in technical appreciation.”

The Education of Henry Adams (1907)

“…not one rebel defection — not even Robert E. Lee's — cost young Adams a personal pang; but Sumner's struck home.”

The Education of Henry Adams (1907)

“For years Adams had taught American youth never to travel without a Senator who was useful even in America at times, but indispensable in Russia where, in 1901, anarchists, even though conservative and Christian, were ill-seen. This wing of the anarchistic party consisted rigorously of but two members, Adams and Bay Lodge.”

The Education of Henry Adams (1907)

“Even in prose, the greatest writers have not often succeeded in stating simply and clearly the fact that Infinity can make itself finite or that Space can make itself bounds or that Eternity can generate time. In verse, Adam did it as easily as though he were writing any other miracle.”

Mont Saint Michel and Chartres (1904)

“Macaulay was the English historian. Adams had the greatest admiration for Macaulay, but he felt that any one who should even distantly imitate Macaulay would perish in self-contempt. One might as well imitate Shakespeare.”

The Education of Henry Adams (1907)

“...he took his lesson of political morality as learned, his notice to quit as duly served, and supposed his education to be finished.

Everyone thought so, and the whole City was in a turmoil. Any intelligent education ought to end when it is complete. One would then feel fewer hesitations and would handle a surer world. The old-fashioned logical drama required unity and sense; the actual drama is a pointless puzzle, without even an intrigue. When the curtain fell on Gladstone's speech, any student had the right to suppose the drama ended; none could have affirmed that it was about to begin; that one's painful lesson was thrown away.”

The Education of Henry Adams (1907), Chapter X Political Morality

“This education startled even a man who had dabbled in fifty educations all over the world; for, if he were obliged to insist on a Universe, he seemed driven to the Church. Modern science guaranteed no unity. The student seemed to feel himself, like all his predecessors, caught, trapped, meshed in this eternal drag-net of religion.

In practice the student escapes this dilemma in two ways: the first is that of ignoring it, as one escapes most dilemmas; the second is that the Church rejects pantheism as worse than atheism, and will have nothing to do with the pantheist at any price.”

The Education of Henry Adams (1907)

“American literature offers scarcely one working model for high education. The student must go back, beyond Jean Jacques, to Benjamin Franklin, to find a model even of self-teaching. Except in the abandoned sphere of the dead languages, no one has discussed what part of education has, in his personal experience, turned out to be useful, and what not. This volume attempts to discuss it.”

The Education of Henry Adams (1907)

“Of all the conditions of his youth which afterwards puzzled the grown-up man, this disappearance of religion puzzled him most. The boy went to church twice every Sunday; he was taught to read his Bible, and he learned religious poetry by heart; he believed in a mild deism; he prayed; he went through all the forms; but neither to him nor to his brothers or sisters was religion real. Even the mild discipline of the Unitarian Church was so irksome that they all threw it off at the first possible moment, and never afterwards entered a church. The religious instinct had vanished, and could not be revived, although one made in later life many efforts to recover it.

That the most powerful emotion of man, next to the sexual, should disappear, might be a personal defect of his own; but that the most intelligent society, led by the most intelligent clergy, in the most moral conditions he ever knew, should have solved all the problems of the universe so thoroughly as to have quite ceased making itself anxious about past or future, and should have persuaded itself that all the problems which had convulsed human thought from earliest recorded time, were not worth discussing, seemed to him the most curious social phenomenon he had to account for in a long life.”

The Education of Henry Adams (1907)

“No honest historian can take part with — or against — the forces he has to study. To him even the extinction of the human race should be merely a fact to be grouped with other vital statistics.”

The Education of Henry Adams (1907)

“Even in America, 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.”

Henry Adams book The Education of Henry Adams

Ch. 35 http://books.google.com/books?id=-ThaAAAAMAAJ&q=%22Even+in+America+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%22&pg=PA502#v=onepage. <br class="br">The Education of Henry Adams (1907)

“Man had in the beginning no power of analysis or synthesis approaching that of the spider, or even of the honey-bee; he had acute sensibility to the higher forces. Fire taught him secrets that no other animal could learn; running water probably taught him even more, especially in his first lessons of mechanics; the animals helped to educate him, trusting themselves into his hands merely for the sake of their food, and carrying his burdens or supplying his clothing; the grasses and grains were academies of study.”

The Education of Henry Adams (1907)

“…in his case it went further and became indifference to social distinction. Never once in forty years of intimacy did his son notice in him a trace of snobbishness. He was one of the exceedingly small number of Americans to whom an English duke or duchess seemed to be indifferent, and royalty itself nothing more than a slightly inconvenient presence. This was, it is true, rather the tone of English society in his time, but Americans were largely responsible for changing it, and Mr. Adams had every possible reason for affecting the manner of a courtier even if he did not feel the sentiment. Never did his son see him flatter or vilify, or show a sign of envy or jealousy; never a shade of vanity or self-conceit. Never a tone of arrogance! Never a gesture of pride!”

The Education of Henry Adams (1907)

“At Chartres Christ is identified with his Mother, the spirit of love and grace, and his Church is the Church Triumphant.

Not only is Fear absent; there is not even a suggestion of pain; there is not a martyr with the symbol of his martyrdom; and what is still more striking, in the sculptured life of Christ, from the Nativity to the Ascension, which adorns the capitals of the columns, the single scene that has been omitted is the Crucifixion. There, as everywhere in this Portal, the artists seem actually to have gone out of their way to avoid a suggestion of suffering.”

Mont Saint Michel and Chartres (1904)

“As a companion, King's charm was great, but this was not the quality that so much attracted Adams, nor could he affect even distant rivalry on this ground. Adams could never tell a story, chiefly because he always forgot it.”

The Education of Henry Adams (1907)