Quote

One friend in a life-time is much two are many three are hardly possible. Friendship needs a certain parallelism of life, a community of thought, a rivalry of aim.

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
Needs
Possible
Much
Community
Time
Three
Parallelism
Life
Two
Rivalry
Thought
Hardly
Certain
Aim
Many
Friendship
Real
Friend

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The chief wonder of education is that it does not ruin everybody concerned in it, teachers and taught.
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Practical politics consists in ignoring facts.
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Women have, commonly, a very positive moral sense that which they will, is right that which they reject, is wrong and their will, in most cases, ends by settling the moral.
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The less a tourist knows, the fewer mistakes he need make, for he will not expect himself to explain ignorance.
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If one shed tears, they must be shed on one's pillow.
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Young men have a passion for regarding their elders as senile.
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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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Unbroken Evolution under uniform conditions pleased every one -- except curates and bishops it was the very best substitute for religion a safe, conservative practical, thoroughly Common-Law deity.
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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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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.
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Politics cannot stop to study psychology Its methods are rough its judgments rougher still.
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Man is an imperceptible atom always trying to become one with God.
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No man can instruct more than half-a-dozen students at once. The whole problem of education is one of its cost in money.
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There is no such thing as an underestimate of average intelligence.
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You may cut off the heads of every rich man now living--of every statesman--every literary, and every scientific authority, without in the least changing the social situation. Artists, of course, disappeared long ago as social forces. So did the church. Corporations are not elevators, but levellers, as I see them.
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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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During an election campaign the air is full of speeches and vice versa.
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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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Of all studies, the one he would rather have avoided was that of his own mind. He knew no tragedy so heartrending as introspection.
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Education should try to lessen the obstacles, diminish the friction, invigorate the energy, and should train minds to react, not at haphazard, but by choice, on the lines of force that attract their world. What one knows is, in youth, of little moment they know enough who know how to learn.
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