Henry Adams

Henry Adams
Henry Brooks Adamswas an American historian and member of the Adams political family, being descended from two U.S. Presidents...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth16 February 1838
CityBoston, MA
CountryUnited States of America
art language american-language
American art, like the American language and American education, was as far as possible sexless.
art paris saint
[After viewing the Palace of Electricity at the 1900 Trocadero Exposition in Paris] [Saint-Gaudens and Matthew Arnold] felt a railway train as power; yet they, and all other artists, constantly complained that the power embodied in a railway train could never be embodied in art. All the steam in the world could not, like the Virgin, build Chartres.
art mean literature
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.
running art philosophy
From cradle to grave this problem of running order through chaos, direction through space, discipline through freedom, unity through multiplicity, has always been, and must always be, the task of education, as it is the moral of religion, philosophy, science, art, politics and economy; but 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...
artist
An artist's business is only to see.
artist long-ago church
Artists... disappeared long ago as social forces. So did the church.
teacher giving parent
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.
philosophy order medicine
Unity is vision; it must have been part of the process of learning to see.
few means slippery
No one means all he says, and yet very few say all they mean, for words are slippery and thought is viscous.
man
A man must now swallow more belief than he can digest.
politics systematic
Politics... have always been the systematic organization of hatreds.
education mind purpose
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.
struggle men modern
Modern politics is, at bottom, a struggle not of men but of forces.
saint assuming century
Even theologians, even the great theologians of the thirteenth century, even Saint Thomas Aquinas himself did not trust to faith alone, or assume the existence of God.