Henry Adams

“Nothing in education is so astonishing as the amount of ignorance it accumulates in the form of inert facts.”

“A friend in power is a friend lost.”

“Accident counts for much in companionship, as in marriage.”

“Friendship needs a certain parallelism of life, a community of thought, a rivalry of aim.”

“They know enough who know how to learn.”

“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.”

“Practical politics consists in ignoring facts.”

“Politics, as a practice, whatever its professions, has always been the systematic organization of hatreds.”

“No one means all he says and yet very few say all they mean.”

“Philosophy . . .consists chiefly in suggesting unintelligible answers to insoluble problems.”

“The first serious consciousness of Nature's gesture - her attitude towards life-took form then as a phantasm, a nightmare, all insanity of force. For the first time, the stage-scenery of the...”

“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 hundr...”

“The habit of expression leads to the search for something to express. Something remains as a residuum of the commonplace itself, if one strikes out every commonplace in the expression.”

“Good men do the most harm.”

“Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed. The imagination must be given not wings but weights.”

“The chief wonder of education is that it does not ruin everybody concerned in it, teachers and taught.”

“The habit of looking at life as a social relation — an affair of society — did no good. It cultivated a weakness which needed no cultivation. If it had helped to make men of the world, or gi...”

“Power when wielded by abnormal energy is the most serious of facts.”

“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.”

“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.”