Henry Adams
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Henry Brooks Adams (16 February 1838 – 27 March 1918) was a U.S. historian, journalist, novelist and educator. He was the great-grandson of John Adams, grandson of John Quincy Adams and son of Charles Francis Adams, Sr.
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[edit] Sourced
- For reasons which many persons thought ridiculous, Mrs. Lightfoot Lee decided to pass the winter in Washington. She was in excellent health, but she said that the climate would do her good.
- Democracy (1880), Ch. I, first lines
- 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.
- A History of the United States of America During the First Administration of James Madison (1890), Vol. II, Ch. VI: Meeting of the Twelfth Congress; 1921 edition, p. 123
- I disagree with by brother Charles and Theodore Roosevelt. 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. These facts have nothing to do with the case and should not have been allowed to interfere with just penalties. It's always the good men who do the most harm in the world.
- As quoted in American Heritage (December 1955), p. 44
[edit] The Education of Henry Adams (1907)
- As educator, Jean Jacques was, in one respect, easily first; he erected a monument of warning against the Ego. Since his 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. The tailor adapts the manikin as well as the clothes to his patron's wants. The tailor's object, in this volume, is to fit young men, in universities or elsewhere, to be men of the world, equipped for any emergency; and the garment offered to them is meant to show the faults of the patchwork fitted on their fathers.
- Preface (16 February 1907)
- 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.
- Ch. 2
- Accident counts for much in companionship as in marriage.
- Ch. 4
- Women have, commonly, a very positive moral sense; that which they will, is right; that which they reject, is wrong; and their will, in most cases, ends by settling the moral.
- Ch. 6
- All experience is an arch, to build upon.
- Ch. 6
- Only on the edge of the grave can man conclude anything.
- Ch. 6
- 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.
- Ch. 7
- Although the Senate is much given to admiring in its members a superiority less obvious or quite invisible to outsiders, one Senator seldom proclaims his own inferiority to another, and still more seldom likes to be told of it.
- Ch. 7
- Friends are born, not made.
- Ch. 7
- A friend in power is a friend lost.
- Ch. 7
- 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.
- Ch. 10
- Young men have a passion for regarding their elders as senile.
- Ch. 11
- Knowledge of human nature is the beginning and end of political education.
- Ch. 12
- These questions of taste, of feeling, of inheritance, need no settlement. Every one carries his own inch-rule of taste, and amuses himself by applying it, triumphantly, wherever he travels.
- Ch. 12
- Intimates are predestined.
- Ch. 13
- Chaos often breeds life, when order breeds habit.
- Ch. 13
- At best, the renewal of broken relations is a nervous matter.
- Ch. 13
- Sumner's mind had reached the calm of water which receives and reflects images without absorbing them; it contained nothing but itself.
- Ch. 13
- 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.
- Ch. 17
- 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
- Ch. 18
- That the American, by temperament, worked to excess, was true; work and whiskey were his stimulants; work was a form of vice; but he never cared much for money or power after he earned them.
- Ch. 19
- Any schoolboy could see that man as a force must be measured by motion, from a fixed point. Psychology helped here by suggesting a unit — the point of history when man held the highest idea of himself as a unit in a unified universe. Eight or ten years of study had led Adams to think he might use the century 1150-1250, expressed in Amiens Cathedral and the Works of Thomas Aquinas, as the unit from which he might measure motion down to his own time, without assuming anything as true or untrue, except relation. The movement might be studied at once in philosophy and mechanics. Setting himself to the task, he began a volume which he mentally knew as "Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres: a Study of Thirteenth-Century Unity." From that point he proposed to fix a position for himself, which he could label: "The Education of Henry Adams: a Study of Twentieth-Century Multiplicity." With the help of these two points of relation, he hoped to project his lines forward and backward indefinitely, subject to correction from any one who should know better. Thereupon, he sailed for home.
- On the genesis of two of his historical and autobiographical works, in Ch. 19 : The Abyss of Ignorance (1902)
- Any large body of students stifles the student. No man can instruct more than half-a-dozen students at once.
- Ch. 20
- 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.
- Ch. 20
- A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops.
- Ch. 20
- 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.
- Ch. 21
- What one knows is, in youth, of little moment; they know enough who know how to learn.
- Ch. 21
- He had often noticed that six months' oblivion amounts to newspaper-death, and that resurrection is rare. Nothing is easier, if a man wants it, than rest, profound as the grave.
- Ch. 22
- Morality is a private and costly luxury.
- Ch. 22
- Practical politics consists in ignoring facts.
- Ch. 22
- Nothing in education is so astonishing as the amount of ignorance it accumulates in the form of inert facts.
- Ch. 25
- Power when wielded by abnormal energy is the most serious of facts.
- Ch. 28
- 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.
- Ch. 28
- Modern politics is, at bottom, a struggle not of men but of forces.
- Ch. 28
- We combat obstacles in order to get repose, and, when got, the repose is insupportable.
- Ch. 29
- Simplicity is the most deceitful mistress that ever betrayed man.
- Ch. 30
- No one means all he says, and yet very few say all they mean, for words are slippery and thought is viscous.
- Ch. 31
- Even in America, 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.
- Ch. 35
[edit] Misattributed
- Never esteem anything as of advantage to you that will make you break your word or lose your self-respect.
- Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, iii. 7
[edit] Quotes about Adams
- He used to say, half in jest, that his great ambition was to complete St. Augustine's Confessions, but that St. Augustine, like a great artist, had worked from multiplicity to unity, while he, like a small one, had to reverse the method and work back from unity to multiplicity.
[edit] External links
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Wikisource has the text of the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica article Adams, Henry. |
- Henry Adams, Globe Trotter in Space and Time
- The Education of Henry Adams at the University of Virginia American Studies Hypertext project.
- Mont Saint Michel and Chartres at the University of Virginia American Studies Hypertext project.
- America in 1800 at the University of Virginia American Studies Hypertext project.
- The Letters of Henry Adams
- Henry Adams at Project Gutenberg
- Encyclopedia Britannica: Henry Adams
- Index entry for Henry Brooks Adams at Poets' Corner
- The Broken Arch, an unpublished work by Lorrie Tussman exploring the theme of unity in Western civilization based on the writings of Henry Adams
- Profile at Find a Grave
