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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.

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
Never
Average
Love
Loved
Poise
World
Perfect
Coarse
Nature
Amused
Doe
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Human
Absence
Humans
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Must
Ideals

More quotes by Henry Adams

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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.
Henry Adams
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Every one who marries goes it blind, more or less.
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The common view of marriage as a primitive institution implies in the man more than arbitrary superiority, such as he exercised over the child, which still remained free. The woman's slavery was assumed to be for life.
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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My rule in making up examination questions is to ask questions which I can't myself answer. It astounds me to see how some of my students answer questions which would play the deuce with me.
Henry Adams
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A friend in power is a friend lost.
Henry Adams
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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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Chaos often breeds life, when order breeds habit.
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In the one branch he most needed
Henry Adams
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All State education is a sort of dynamo machine for polarizing the popular mind for turning and holding its lines of force in the direction supposed to be most effective for State purposes.
Henry Adams
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Unity is vision it must have been part of the process of learning to see.
Henry Adams
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Politics cannot stop to study psychology Its methods are rough its judgments rougher still.
Henry Adams
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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.
Henry Adams
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His brothers were the type he was the variation.
Henry Adams
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As for America, it is the ideal fruit of all your youthful hopes and reforms. Everybody is fairly decent, respectable, domestic, bourgeois, middle-class, and tiresome. There is absolutely nothing to revile except that it's a bore.
Henry Adams
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History is only a value of relation.
Henry Adams
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Thank God, I never was cheerful. I come from the happy stock of the Mathers, who, as you remember, passed sweet mornings reflecting on the goodness of God and the damnation of infants.
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. All the dogmatic stations in life have the effect of fixing a certain stiffness of attitude forever, as though they mesmerised the subject.
Henry Adams
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Simplicity is the most deceitful mistress that ever betrayed man.
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