About Henry Adams: Henry Brooks Adams was an American historian and member of the Adams political family, being descended from two U.S. Presidents.
Absolute liberty is absence of restraint; responsibility is restraint; therefore, the ideally free individual is responsible to himself.
No one means all he says, and yet very few say all they mean, for words are slippery and thought is viscous.
Morality is a private and costly luxury.
Only on the edge of the grave can man conclude anything.
Simplicity is the most deceitful mistress that ever betrayed man.
The American President resembles the commander of a ship at sea. He must have a helm to grasp, a course to steer, a port to seek.
We combat obstacles in order to get repose, and when got, the repose is insupportable.
Philosophy: Unintelligible answers to insoluble problems.
A man must now swallow more belief than he can digest.
No man, however strong, can serve ten years as schoolmaster, priest, or Senator, and remain fit for anything else.
The woman who is known only through a man is known wrong.
They know enough who know how to learn.
The proper study of mankind is woman.
Susceptibility to the highest forces is the highest genius.
These questions of taste, of feeling, of inheritance, need no settlement. Everyone carries his own inch-rule of taste, and amuses himself by applying it, triumphantly, wherever he travels.
From cradle to grave this problem of running order through chaos, direction through space, discipline through freedom, unity through multiplicity, has always been, and must always be, the task of education, as it is the moral of religion, philosophy,...
Good men do the most harm.
Seward would inspire a cow with statesmanship if she understood our language.
Everyone carries his own inch rule of taste, and amuses himself by applying it, triumphantly, wherever he travels.
The press is the hired agent of a monied system, and set up for no other purpose than to tell lies where their interests are involved. One can trust nobody and nothing.
I tell you the solemn truth, that the doctrine of the Trinity is not so difficult to accept for a working proposition as any one of the axioms of physics.
