283 Quotes by Henry Adams

Artists... disappeared long ago as social forces. So did the church.

Those who seek education in the paths of duty are always deceived by the illusion that power in the hands of friends is an advantage to them.

I hate photographs abstractly, because they have given me more ideas perversely and immovably wrong, than I ever should get by imagination.

Any schoolboy could see that man as a force must be measured by motion, from a fixed point.

It [love] is a disease to be born with patience, like any nervous complaint, and to be treated with counter-irritants.

From earliest childhood the boy was accustomed to feel that, for him, life was double. Winter and summer, town and country, law and liberty, were hostile, and the man who pretended they were not, was in his eyes a schoolmaster -- that is, a man employed to tell lies to little boys.

Every one who marries goes it blind, more or less.

The proof that a philosopher does not know what he is talking about is apt to sadden his followers before it reacts on himself.

A period of about twelve years measured the beat of the pendulum. After the Declaration of Independence, twelve years had been needed to create an efficient Constitution; another twelve years of energy brought a reaction against the government then created; a third period of twelve years was ending in a sweep toward still greater energy; and already a child could calculate the result of a few more such returns.