American historian (1838-1918)
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
The Education of Henry Adams
A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops.
HENRY ADAMS
The Education of Henry Adams
All experience is an arch to build upon.
HENRY ADAMS
The Education of 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
The Education of Henry Adams
One friend in a lifetime is much; two are many; three are hardly possible.
HENRY ADAMS
The Education of Henry Adams
Unity is vision; it must have been part of the process of learning to see.
HENRY ADAMS
The Education of Henry Adams
The world never loved perfect poise. What the world does love is commonly absence of poise, for it has to be amused.
HENRY ADAMS
The Education of Henry Adams
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.
HENRY ADAMS
The Education of Henry Adams
No man can instruct more than half-a-dozen students at once. The whole problem of education is one of its cost in money.
HENRY ADAMS
The Education of 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 Education of Henry Adams
All State education is a sort of dynamo machine for polarizing the popular mind; for turning and holding its lines of force in the direction supposed to be most effective for State purposes.
HENRY ADAMS
The Education of Henry Adams
Man had in the beginning no power of analysis or synthesis approaching that of the spider, or even of the honey-bee; he had acute sensibility to the higher forces. Fire taught him secrets that no other animal could learn; running water probably taught him even more, especially in his first lessons of mechanics; the animals helped to educate him, trusting themselves into his hands merely for the sake of their food, and carrying his burdens or supplying his clothing; the grasses and grains were academies of study.
HENRY ADAMS
The Education of Henry Adams
As a means of variation from a normal type, sickness in childhood ought to have a certain value not to be classed under any fitness or unfitness of natural selection; and especially scarlet fever affected boys seriously, both physically and in character, though they might through life puzzle themselves to decide whether it had fitted or unfitted them for success.
HENRY ADAMS
The Education of Henry Adams
Practical politics consists in ignoring facts.
HENRY ADAMS
The Education of Henry Adams
Morality is a private and costly luxury.
HENRY ADAMS
The Education of Henry Adams
Man loves most that which is his own.
HENRY ADAMS
Historical Essays
He never labored so hard to learn a language as he did to hold his tongue.
HENRY ADAMS
The Education of 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
Historical Essays
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 Education of Henry Adams
Any schoolboy could see that man as a force must be measured by motion, from a fixed point.
HENRY ADAMS
The Education of Henry Adams