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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.

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
Religion
Practical
Deities
Best
Conservative
Uniform
Every
Evolution
Uniforms
Except
Thoroughly
Safe
Substitute
Conditions
Pleased
Unbroken
Law
Substitutes
Deity
Common
Practicals
Bishops

More quotes by Henry Adams

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They know enough who know how to learn.
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No man likes to have his intelligence or good faith questioned, especially if he has doubts about it himself.
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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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History is only a value of relation.
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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.
Henry Adams
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The study of history is useful to the historian by teaching him his ignorance of women.
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I want to be advertised and the easiest way is to do something obnoxious and do it well.
Henry Adams
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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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Young men have a passion for regarding their elders as senile.
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Boys naturally look on all force as an enemy.
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Even theologians, even the great theologians of the thirteenth century, even Saint Thomas Aquinas himself did not trust to faith alone, or assume the existence of God.
Henry Adams
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[P]hilosophy . . .consists chiefly in suggesting unintelligible answers to insoluble problems.
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History is only a catalogue of the forgotten.
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.
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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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Society is immoral and immortal it can afford to commit any kind of folly, and indulge in any sort of vice it cannot be killed, and the fragments that survive can always laugh at the dead.
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History is the most aristocratic of all literary pursuits, because it obliges the historian to be rich as well as educated.
Henry Adams
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Silence alone is respectable and respected. I believe God to be silence.
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.
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People here are quite struck aback at Sunday's news of the capture of New Orleans. It took them three days to make up their minds to believe it. The division of American had become an idea so fixed that they had about shut out all the avenues to the reception of any other.
Henry Adams