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

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
Study
Knew
Rather
Mind
Would
Introspection
Avoided
Studies
Tragedy

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Power when wielded by abnormal energy is the most serious of facts.
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Practical politics consists in ignoring facts.
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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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They know enough who know how to learn.
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One friend in a lifetime is much two are many three are hardly possible.
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Average human nature is very coarse, and its ideals must necessarily be average. The world never loved perfect poise. What the world does love is commonly absence of poise, for it has to be amused.
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Mathematicians practice absolute freedom.
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It is impossible to underrate human intelligence - beginning with one's own.
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A congressman is a pig. The only way to get his snout from the trough is to rap it sharply with a stick.
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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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Only on the edge of the grave can man conclude anything.
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History is only a catalogue of the forgotten.
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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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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.
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Unity is vision it must have been part of the process of learning to see.
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As History stands, it is a sort of Chinese Play, without end and without lesson.
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I think that Lee should have been hanged. It was all the worse that he was a good man and a fine character and acted conscientiously... It's always the good men who do the most harm in the world.
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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.
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Politics, as a practise, whatever its professions, has always been the systematic organization of hatreds.
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For after all man knows mighty little, and may some day learn enough of his own ignorance to fall down again and pray. Not that Icare. Only, if such is God's will, and Fate and Evolution--let there be God!
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