The God-Seeker (1949), Ch. 4
“The English mind was like the London drawing room, a comfortable and easy spot, filled with bits and fragments of incoherent furnitures, which were never meant to go together, and could be arranged in any relation without making a whole, except by the square room. Philosophy might dispute about innate ideas till the stars died out in the sky, but about innate tastes no one, except perhaps a collie-dog, has the right to doubt; least of all the Englishman, for his tastes are his being; he drifts after them as unconsciously as a honey-bee drifts after his flowers.”
The Education of Henry Adams (1907)
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Henry Adams 311
journalist, historian, academic, novelist 1838–1918Related quotes
The Evolution of A Revolt (1920)
Source: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974), Ch. 6
Identifying his "destroyed" personality as "Phædrus"
Context: Now I want to begin to fulfill a certain obligation by stating that there was one person, no longer here, who had something to say, and who said it, but whom no one believed or really understood. Forgotten. For reasons that will become apparent I'd prefer that he remain forgotten, but there's no choice other than to reopen his case.
I don't know his whole story. No one ever will, except Phædrus himself, and he can no longer speak. But from his writings and from what others have said and from fragments of my own recall it should be possible to piece together some kind of approximation of what he was talking about.
“You could tell a lot about a man by the books he keeps - his tastes, his interest, his habits.”
Source: Illuminations: Essays and Reflections
I.597
Human, All Too Human (1878)
Context: No one talks more passionately about his rights than he who in the depths of his soul doubts whether he has any. By enlisting passion on his side he wants to stifle his reason and its doubts: thus he will acquire a good conscience and with it success among his fellow men.
“You never find an Englishman among the under-dogs—except in England, of course.”
Source: The Loved One (1948), Chapter 1
Source: Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn, Stone of Farewell (1990), Chapter 28, “Sparks” (p. 707).