110+ Henry Adams Quotes On Teachers, Intellectual And Progressive

Henry Adams was an American historian and an acclaimed writer. He is best known for his nine-volume History of the United States of America, which he wrote between 1891 and 1918. His other works include The Education of Henry Adams, a memoir reflecting on his life and times. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Henry Adams on teachers, intellectual, progressive.

Top 10 Henry Adams Quotes

1. All experience is an arch, to build upon.
2. A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops.
3. A parent gives life, but as parent, gives no more. A murderer takes life, but his deed stops there. A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops.
4. They know enough who know how to learn.
5. 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.
6. Morality is a private and costly luxury.
7. Chaos was the law of nature; Order was the dream of man.
8. One friend in a lifetime is much; two are many; three are hardly possible.
9. Chaos often breeds life, when order breeds habit.
10. 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.

Henry Adams Image Quotes

A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops. — Henry Adams

They know enough who know how to learn. — Henry Adams

Morality is a private and costly luxury. — Henry Adams

Henry Adams Short Quotes

• The proper study of mankind is woman.
• Friends are born, not made.
• The Jewish question is really the most serious of our problems.
• The world is coming to an end in 1950.
• Simplicity is the most deceitful mistress that ever betrayed man.
• A friend in power is a friend lost.
• The woman who is known only through a man is known wrong.
• It is always good men who do the most harm in the world.
• At best, the renewal of broken relations is a nervous matter.
• Accident counts for as much in companionship as in marriage.

Henry Adams Quotes About Teachers

Teachers affect eternity. There is no telling where their influence stops. — Henry Adams

The chief wonder of education is that it does not ruin everybody concerned in it, teachers and taught. — Henry Adams

Throughout human history the waste of mind has been appalling, and, as this story is meant to show, society has conspired to promote it. No doubt the teacher is the worst criminal, but the world stands behind him and drags the student from his course. — Henry Adams

Teachers affect eternity; no one can tell where their influence stops. — Henry Adams

Henry Adams Quotes About Progressive

The progress of evolution from President Washington to President Grant was alone evidence to upset Darwin. — Henry Adams

Mr Jefferson meant that the American system should be a democracy, and he would rather have let the whole world perish than that this principle, which to him represented all that man was worth, should fail. Mr Hamilton considered democracy a fatal curse, and meant to stop its progress. — Henry Adams

Laplace would have found it child's-play to fix a ratio of progression in mathematical science between Descartes, Leibnitz, Newton and himself — Henry Adams

Henry Adams Quotes About Politics

Practical politics consists in ignoring facts. — Henry Adams

Knowledge of human nature is the beginning and end of political education. — Henry Adams

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. — Henry Adams

Politics, as a practise, whatever its professions, has always been the systematic organization of hatreds. — Henry Adams

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. — Henry Adams

The social side of Washington was to be taken for granted as three-fourths of existence. Politics and reform became the detail, and waltzing the profession — Henry Adams

You can't use tact with a Congressman! A Congressman is a hog! You must take a stick and hit him on the snout! — Henry Adams

Politics, as a practice, whatever its professions, has always been the systematic organization of hatreds. — Henry Adams

American politics is a struggle, not of men but of forces. The men become every year more and more creatures of force, massed about central power houses. — Henry Adams

As a historian, he felt it his duty to respect everything that had ever been respected, except for the occasional statesman. — Henry Adams

Henry Adams Quotes About Intelligence

There is no such thing as an underestimate of average intelligence. — Henry Adams

It is impossible to underrate human intelligence -- beginning with one's own. — Henry Adams

No man likes to have his intelligence or good faith questioned, especially if he has doubts about it himself. — Henry Adams

It is impossible to underrate human intelligence - beginning with one's own. — Henry Adams

Henry Adams Quotes About Order

[regarding US conquest of the Philippines] I turn green in bed at midnight if I think of the horror of a year's warfare in the Philippines ... We must slaughter a million or two foolish Malays in order to give them the comforts of flannel petticoats and electric railways. — Henry Adams

Unity is vision; it must have been part of the process of learning to see. — Henry Adams

We combat obstacles in order to get repose, and when got, the repose is insupportable. — Henry Adams

Since [Rousseau's] time, and largely thanks to him, the Ego has steadily tended to efface itself, and, for purposes of model, to become a manikin on which the toilet of education is to be draped in order to show the fit or misfit of the clothes. The object of study is the garment, not the figure. — Henry Adams

Chaos breeds life; Order creates habit. — Henry Adams

Henry Adams Quotes About Slippery

No one means all he says, and yet very few say all they mean, for words are slippery and thought is vicious. — Henry Adams

No man means all he says, and yet very few say all they mean, for words are slippery and thought is viscous. — Henry Adams

No one means all he says, and yet very few say all they mean, for words are slippery and thought is viscous. — Henry Adams

Henry Adams Quotes About Life

As for piracy, I love to be pirated. It is the greatest compliment an author can have. The wholesale piracy of Democracy was the single real triumph of my life. Anyone may steal what he likes from me. — Henry Adams

He never labored so hard to learn a language as he did to hold his tongue, and it affected him for life. The habit of reticence — of talking without meaning — is never effaced. — Henry Adams

One does every day and without a second thought, what at another time would be the event of a year, perhaps of a life. — Henry Adams

No man, however strong, can serve ten years as schoolmaster, priest, or Senator, and remain fit for anything else. All the dogmatic stations in life have the effect of fixing a certain stiffness of attitude forever, as though they mesmerised the subject. — Henry Adams

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. — Henry Adams

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. — Henry Adams

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. — Henry Adams

The common view of marriage as a primitive institution implies in the man more than arbitrary superiority, such as he exercised over the child, which still remained free. The woman's slavery was assumed to be for life. — Henry Adams

To my fancy, one looks back on life, it has only two responsibilities, which include all the others: one is the bringing of new life into existence; the other, educating it after it is brought in. All betrayals of trust result from these original sins. — Henry Adams

The Virgin filled so enormous a space in the life and thought of the time that one stands now helpless before the mass of testimony to her direct action and constant presence in every moment and form of the illusion which men thought they thought their existence. — Henry Adams

Henry Adams Famous Quotes And Sayings

A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops. — Henry Adams

They know enough who know how to learn. — Henry Adams

Morality is a private and costly luxury. — Henry Adams

I firmly believe, that before many centuries more, science will be the master of man. The engines he will have invented will be beyond his strength to control. Someday, science shall have the existence of mankind in its power, and the human race commit suicide by blowing up the world. — Henry Adams

You say that love is nonsense. I tell you it is no such thing. For weeks and months it is a steady physical pain, an ache about the heart, never leaving one, by night or by day; a long strain on one's nerves like toothache or rheumatism, not intolerable at any one instant, but exhausting by its steady drain on the strength. — Henry Adams

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. — Henry Adams

The scientific mind is atrophied, and suffers under inherited cerebral weakness, when it comes in contact with the eternal woman--Astarte, Isis, Demeter, Aphrodite, and the last and greatest deity of all, the Virgin. — Henry Adams

Nothing in education is so astonishing as the amount of ignorance it accumulates in the form of inert facts. — Henry Adams

Society is immoral and immortal; it can afford to commit any kind of folly, and indulge in any sort of vice; it cannot be killed, and the fragments that survive can always laugh at the dead. — Henry Adams

The effect of power and publicity on all men is the aggravation of self, a sort of tumor that ends by killing the victim's sympathies. — Henry Adams

My belief is that science is to wreck us, and that we are like monkeys monkeying with a loaded shell; we don't in the least know or care where our practically infinite energies come from or will bring us to. — Henry Adams

[Adams] supposed that, except musicians, everyone thought Beethoven a bore, as every one except mathematicians thought mathematics a bore. — Henry Adams

Absolute liberty is absence of restraint; responsibility is restraint; therefore, the ideally free individual is responsible to himself. — Henry Adams

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. — Henry Adams

A senator is like a begonia - showy but useless. — Henry Adams

Everyone carries his own inch rule of taste, and amuses himself by applying it, triumphantly, wherever he travels. — Henry Adams

History is only a catalogue of the forgotten. — Henry Adams

The historian must not try to know what is truth, if he values his honesty; for if he cares for his truths, he is certain to falsify his facts. — Henry Adams

American society is a sort of flat, fresh-water pond which absorbs silently, without reaction, anything which is thrown into it. — Henry Adams

A society in stable equilibrium is-by definition-one that has no history and wants no historians. — Henry Adams

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. — Henry Adams

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. — Henry Adams

He too serves a certain purpose who only stands and cheers. — Henry Adams

Young men have a passion for regarding their elders as senile. — Henry Adams

Modern politics is, at bottom, a struggle not of men but of forces. The men become every year more and more creatures of force, massed about central powerhouses. The conflict is no longer between the men, but between the motors that drive the men, and the men tend to succumb to their own motive forces. — Henry Adams

The sensation of seeing extremely fine women, with superb forms, perfectly unconscious of undress, and yet evidently aware of their beauty and dignity, is worth a week's seasickness to experience... [to me] the effect [of a Siva dance] was that of a dozen Rembrandts intensified into the most glowing beauty of life and motion. — Henry Adams

Average human nature is very coarse, and its ideals must necessarily be average. The world never loved perfect poise. What the world does love is commonly absence of poise, for it has to be amused. — Henry Adams

Power when wielded by abnormal energy is the most serious of facts. — Henry Adams

Energy is the inherent effort of every multiplicity to become unity. — Henry Adams

Every man should have a fair-sized cemetary in which to bury the faults of his friends. — Henry Adams

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. — Henry Adams

I am fairly tired--bored beyond endurance--by the world we live in, and its ideals, and am ready to say so, not violently, but kindly, as one rubs salt into the back of a flogged sailor as though one loved him. — Henry Adams

A congressman is a pig. The only way to get his snout from the trough is to rap it sharply with a stick. — Henry Adams

Unintelligible answers to insoluble problems. — Henry Adams

Every syllable that can be struck out is pure profit, and every page that can be economised is a five-per-cent dividend. Nature rebels against this rule; the flesh is weak, and shrinks from the scissors; I groan in retrospect over the weak. — Henry Adams

The American man is a very simple and cheap mechanism. The American woman I find a complicated and expensive one. Contrasts of feminine types are possible. I am not absolutely sure that there is more than one American man. — Henry Adams

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

A man must now swallow more belief than he can digest. — Henry Adams

It is now conceded that all idea of British intervention is at an end... I want to hug the army of the Potomac. I want to get the whole army of Vicksburg drunk at my own expense. I want to fight some small man and lick him. — Henry Adams

People here are quite struck aback at Sunday's news of the capture of New Orleans. It took them three days to make up their minds to believe it. The division of American had become an idea so fixed that they had about shut out all the avenues to the reception of any other. — Henry Adams

Power is poison. Its effect on Presidents had always been tragic. — Henry Adams

The gothic is singular in this; one seems easily at home in the renaissance; one is not too strange in the Byzantine; as for the Roman, it is ourselves; and we could walk blindfolded through every chink and cranny of the Greek mind; all these styles seem modern when we come close to them; but the gothic gets away. — Henry Adams

I want to be advertised and the easiest way is to do something obnoxious and do it well. — Henry Adams

Politics... have always been the systematic organization of hatreds. — Henry Adams

The whole fabric of society will go to wrack if we really lay hands of reform on our rotten institutions. From top to bottom the whole system is a fraud, all of us know it, laborers and capitalists alike, and all of us are consenting parties to it. — Henry Adams

Everyone carries his own inch rule of taste, and amuse himself by applying it, triumphantly, wherever he travels. — Henry Adams

If one shed tears, they must be shed on one's pillow. — Henry Adams

My own conclusion is that history is simply social development along the lines of weakest resistance, and that in most cases the line of weakest resistance is found as unconsciously by society as by water. — Henry Adams

My rule in making up examination questions is to ask questions which I can't myself answer. It astounds me to see how some of my students answer questions which would play the deuce with me. — Henry Adams

In the one branch he most needed — Henry Adams

Man always made, and still makes, grotesque blunders in selecting and measuring forces, taken at random from the heap, but he never made a mistake in the value he set on the whole, which he symbolized as unity and worshipped as God. To this day, his attitude towards it has never changed, though science can no longer give to force a name. — Henry Adams

Education should try to lessen the obstacles, diminish the friction, invigorate the energy, and should train minds to react, not at haphazard, but by choice, on the lines of force that attract their world. What one knows is, in youth, of little moment; they know enough who know how to learn. — Henry Adams

The best date movies give you something to talk about. A movie that's a downer is a great way to find out about someone. — Henry Adams

My favorite figure of the American author is that of a man who breeds a favorite dog, which he throws into the Mississippi River for the pleasure of making a splash. The river does not splash, but it drowns the dog. — Henry Adams

The difference is slight, to the influence of an author, whether he is read by five hundred readers, or by five hundred thousand; if he can select the five hundred, he reaches the five hundred thousand. — Henry Adams

Of all studies, the one he would rather have avoided was that of his own mind. He knew no tragedy so heartrending as introspection. — Henry Adams

If I grapple with sin in my own strength, the devil knows he may go to sleep. — Henry Adams

Man is an imperceptible atom always trying to become one with God. — Henry Adams

The outline of the city became frantic in its effort to explain something that defied meaning. Power seemed to have outgrown its servitude and to have asserted its freedom. The cylinder had exploded, and thrown great masses of stone and steam against the sky. — Henry Adams

In correct theology, the Virgin ought not to be represented in bed, for she could not suffer like ordinary women, but her palace at Chartres is not much troubled by theology, and to her, as empress-mother, the pain of child-birth was a pleasure which she wanted her people to share. — Henry Adams

Probably the institution of marriage had its origin in love of property. Both men and women were united in this--that whatever they loved best, they wished to possess. The usual theory holds that the communal system would not permit the gratification of this desire at the expense of communal rights, and that therefore men were driven to gratify their passion by purchasing or by capturing women from neighboring and hostile tribes. — Henry Adams

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

Philosophy: Unintelligible answers to insoluble problems. — Henry Adams

If any one of us has had an ambition higher than that of making money; a motive better than that of expediency; a faith warmer than that of reasoning; a love purer than that of the self; he has been slow to express it; still slower to urge it. — Henry Adams

Life Lessons by Henry Adams

1. Henry Adams taught us to never be complacent in our learning, but to continuously strive for knowledge and understanding.
2. He also showed us the importance of maintaining a sense of humility and perspective, no matter how successful we may become.
3. Finally, he demonstrated that it is possible to make a meaningful contribution to society, even if it is not in the form of a tangible product or service.