283 Quotes by Henry Adams

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.

He could teach his students nothing. He was only educating himself at their cost.

What one knows is, in youth, of little moment; they know enough who know how to learn.

I think that Lee should have been hanged. It was all the worse that he was a good man and a fine character and acted conscientiously. It’s always the good men who do the most harm in the world.

Were half the power that fills the world with terror, Were half the wealth bestowed on camps and courts, Given to redeem the human mind from error, There were no need of arsenals nor forts.

A new friend is always a miracle, but at thirty-three years old, such a bird of paradise rising in the sage-brush was an avatar. One friend in a lifetime is much; two are many; three are hardly.

As for America, it is the ideal fruit of all your youthful hopes and reforms. Everybody is fairly decent, respectable, domestic, bourgeois, middle-class, and tiresome. There is absolutely nothing to revile except that it’s a bore.

Charles Sumner’s mind had reached the calm of WATER which receives and reflects images without absorbing them; it contains nothing but itself.

A boy’s will is his life, and he dies when it is broken, as the colt dies in harness, taking a new nature in becoming tame.