Henry Adams Quotes

One is a saint or one is not; every man can choose the career that suits him; but to be saint and sinner at the same time requires singular ingenuity.

I know of nothing useful in life except what is beautiful or creates beauty.

An artist must be man, woman and demi-god.

Wharton was captivated by her sweet face, and tried to make her understand his theory that the merit of a painting was not so much in what it explained as in what it suggested.

In this atmosphere of charity, where all faiths were alike and all professions joined hands, the church and the world became one.

The audacity of the man would have seemed sublime if she had felt sure that he knew the difference between good and evil, between a lie and the truth; but the more she saw of him, the surer she was that his courage was mere moral paralysis, and that he talked about virtue and vice as a man who is colour-blind talks about red and green; he did not see them as she saw them; if left to choose for himself he would have nothing to guide him. Was it politics that had caused this atrophy of the moral senses by disuse? Meanwhile, here she sat face to face with a moral lunatic.

...any woman will, under the right conditions, marry any man at any time, provided her "higher nature" is properly appealed to.

She regarded men as creatures made for women to dispose of.

I have got so far as to lose the distinction between right and wrong. Isn't that the first step in politics?

I have faith; not perhaps in the old dogmas, but in the new ones; faith in human nature; faith in science; faith in the survival of the fittest. Let us be true to our time, Mrs. Lee!

Who, then, is right? How can we all be right? Half of our wise men declare that the world is going straight to perdition; the other half that it is fast becoming perfect. Both cannot be right.

For reasons which many persons thought ridiculous, Mrs. Lightfoot Lee decided to pass the winter in Washington. She was in excellent health, but she said that the climate would do her good.

We never despised the world or its opinions, we only failed to find out its existence. The world, if it exists, feels exactly in the same way towards us, and cares not one straw whether we exist or not. Philosophy has never got beyond this point. There are but two schools: one turns the world onto me; the other turns me onto the world; and the result is the same. The so-called me is a very, very small and foolish puppy-dog, but it is all that exists, and it tries all its life to get a little bigger by enlarging its energies, and getting dollars or getting friends.

I turn green in bed at midnight if I think of the horror of a year's warfare in the Philippines ... We must slaughter a million or two foolish Malays in order to give them the comforts of flannel petticoats and electric railways.

Man has mounted science, and is now run away with. I firmly believe that before many centuries more, science will be the master of men. The engines he will have invented will be beyond his strength to control. Someday science may have the existence of mankind in its power, and the human race commit suicide, by blowing up the world.