Top 15 Henry Adams Quotes

Chaos often breeds life, when order breeds habit.

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

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

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

Friends are born, not made.

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.

Unity is vision; it must have been part of the process of learning to see.

A new friend is always a miracle, but at thirty-three years old, such a bird of paradise rising in the sage-brush was an avatar. One friend in a lifetime is much; two are many; three are hardly possible.

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

A friend in power is a friend lost.

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.

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

He never labored so hard to learn a language as he did to hold his tongue, and it affected him for life. The habit of reticence — of talking without meaning — is never effaced.

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

Of all studies, the one he would rather have avoided was that of his own mind. He knew no tragedy so heartrending as introspection.