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Man is an imperceptible atom always trying to become one with God.

Henry Adams

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Henry Adams
Age: 80 †
Born: 1838
Born: February 16
Died: 1918
Died: March 27
Historian
Historian Of The Modern Age
Journalist
Mathematician
Novelist
Writer
Boston
Massachusetts
Frances Snow Compton
Henry Adams
Imperceptible
Atom
Atoms
God
Become
Trying
Always
Men

More quotes by Henry Adams

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I am fairly tired--bored beyond endurance--by the world we live in, and its ideals, and am ready to say so, not violently, but kindly, as one rubs salt into the back of a flogged sailor as though one loved him.
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The American President resembles the commander of a ship at sea. He must have a helm to grasp, a course to steer, a port to seek.
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One sought not absolute truth. One sought only a spool on which to wind the thread of history without breaking it.
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The idea that any personal deity could find pleasure or profit in torturing a poor woman, by accident, with a fiendish cruelty known to man only in perverted and insane temperaments, could not be held for a moment. For pure blasphemy, it made pure atheism a comfort.
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It is always good men who do the most harm in the world.
Henry Adams
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Young men have a passion for regarding their elders as senile.
Henry Adams
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Politics is simply the organization of hatreds.
Henry Adams
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No historian can take part with--or against--the forces he has to study. To him even the extinction of the human race should merely be a fact to be grouped with other vital statistics.
Henry Adams
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My favorite figure of the American author is that of a man who breeds a favorite dog, which he throws into the Mississippi River for the pleasure of making a splash. The river does not splash, but it drowns the dog.
Henry Adams
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The great word Evolution had not yet, in 1860, made a new religion of history, but the old religion had preached the same doctrinefor a thousand years without finding in the entire history of Rome anything but flat contradiction.
Henry Adams
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By nature, man is lazy, working only under compulsion and when he is strong we will always live, as far as he can, upon the labor or the property of the weak.
Henry Adams
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Wild as man was, and disgusting as the more degraded tribes and communities were, the best of them, and all those from which further advance came, were marked by good qualities, or they could never have risen to a higher stage.
Henry Adams
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His brothers were the type he was the variation.
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No man likes to have his intelligence or good faith questioned, especially if he has doubts about it himself.
Henry Adams
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History will die if not irritated. The only service I can do to my profession is to serve as a flea.
Henry Adams
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One does every day and without a second thought, what at another time would be the event of a year, perhaps of a life.
Henry Adams
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Nothing in education is so astonishing as the amount of ignorance it accumulates in the form of inert facts.
Henry Adams
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I hate photographs abstractly, because they have given me more ideas perversely and immovably wrong, than I ever should get by imagination.
Henry Adams
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No man, however strong, can serve ten years as schoolmaster, priest, or Senator, and remain fit for anything else.
Henry Adams
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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.
Henry Adams