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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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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
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Fit
Senator
Strong
Remain
Priest
Else
Subject
Senators
Certain
However
Stations
Anything
Subjects
Priests
Stiffness
Years
Effects
Ten
Schoolmaster
Men
Attitude
Effect
Dogmatic
Life
Forever
Serve
Fixing

More quotes by Henry Adams

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You say that love is nonsense. I tell you it is no such thing. For weeks and months it is a steady physical pain, an ache about the heart, never leaving one, by night or by day a long strain on one's nerves like toothache or rheumatism, not intolerable at any one instant, but exhausting by its steady drain on the strength.
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Every one who marries goes it blind, more or less.
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History is only a value of relation.
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As for piracy, I love to be pirated. It is the greatest compliment an author can have. The wholesale piracy of Democracy was the single real triumph of my life. Anyone may steal what he likes from me.
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Practical politics consists in ignoring facts.
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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.
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The Jewish question is really the most serious of our problems.
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I want to be advertised and the easiest way is to do something obnoxious and do it well.
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Man loves most that which is his own.
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Politics are a very unsatisfactory game.
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The proper study of mankind is woman.
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What a vast fraternity it is,--that of 'Hearts that Ache.' For the last three months it has seemed to me as though all society were coming to me, to drop its mask for a moment and initiate me into the mystery. How we do suffer! And we go on laughing for, as a practical joke at our expense, life is a success.
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The sensation of seeing extremely fine women, with superb forms, perfectly unconscious of undress, and yet evidently aware of their beauty and dignity, is worth a week's seasickness to experience... [to me] the effect [of a Siva dance] was that of a dozen Rembrandts intensified into the most glowing beauty of life and motion.
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For reasons which many persons thought ridiculous, Mrs. Lightfoot Lee decided to pass the winter in Washington.
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Chaos was the law of nature Order was the dream of man.
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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.
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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.
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We combat obstacles in order to get repose, and when got, the repose is insupportable.
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There is no such thing as an underestimate of average intelligence.
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Nothing is more tiresome than a superannuated pedagogue.
Henry Adams