About Henry Adams: Henry Brooks Adams was an American historian and member of the Adams political family, being descended from two U.S. Presidents.
In Paris and London he had seen nothing to make a return to life worth while; in Washington he saw plenty of reasons for staying dead.
The tourist was the great conservative who hated novelty and adored dirt.
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.
The progress of evolution from President Washington to President Grant was alone evidence to upset Darwin.
I am an anarchist in politics and an impressionist in art as well as a symbolist in literature. Not that I understand what these terms mean, but I take them to be all merely synonyms of pessimist.
At best, the renewal of broken relations is a nervous matter.
All experience is an arch, to build upon.
Chaos often breeds life, when order breeds habit.
Nothing in education is so astonishing as the amount of ignorance it accumulates in the form of inert facts.
Knowledge of human nature is the beginning and end of political education.
It is always good men who do the most harm in the world.
One friend in a lifetime is much, two are many, three are hardly possible. Friendship needs a certain parallelism of life, a community of thought, a rivalry of aim.
No man likes to have his intelligence or good faith questioned, especially if he has doubts about it himself.
I have written too much history to have faith in it; and if anyone thinks I'm wrong, I am inclined to agree with him.
Every man who has at last succeeded, after long effort, in calling up the divinity which lies hidden in a woman's heart, is startled to find that he must obey the God he summoned.
Thank God, I never was cheerful. I come from the happy stock of the Mathers, who, as you remember, passed sweet mornings reflecting on the goodness of God and the damnation of infants.
Man is an imperceptible atom always trying to become one with God.
There is no such thing as an underestimate of average intelligence.
It is impossible to underrate human intelligence - beginning with one's own.
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.
