Henry Adams Quotes

Author Image

Henry Adams

Profession : Historian

Birth : February 16, 1838

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

Henry Adams

Chaos was the law of nature; Order was the dream of man.

Henry Adams

A friend in power is a friend lost.

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

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

Henry Adams

Accident counts for as much in companionship as in marriage.

Henry Adams

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

Henry Adams

Chaos often breeds life, when order breeds habit.

Henry Adams

All experience is an arch, to build upon.

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

The woman who is known only through a man is known wrong.

Henry Adams

Friends are born, not made.

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.

Henry Adams

Morality is a private and costly luxury.

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

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

Henry Adams

They know enough who know how to learn.

Henry Adams

Simplicity is the most deceitful mistress that ever betrayed man.

Henry Adams

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

Henry Adams

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.

Henry Adams