Quote

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.

Henry Adams

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Life
Worth
Perfectly
Evidently
Fine
Extremely
Superb
Week
Forms
Glowing
Seeing
Effect
Sensation
Beauty
Aware
Sensations
Siva
Experience
Dignity
Dozen
Seasickness
Form
Dance
Motion
Undress
Women
Effects
Unconscious
Intensified

More quotes by Henry Adams

Image
The tourist was the great conservative who hated novelty and adored dirt.
Henry Adams
Image
Young men have a passion for regarding their elders as senile.
Henry Adams
Image
There are two things that seem to be at the bottom of our constitutions one is a continual tendency towards politics the other is family pride and it is strange how these two feelings run through all of us.
Henry Adams
Image
Some day science may have the existence of mankind in its power, and the human race commit suicide, by blowing up the world.
Henry Adams
Image
Teachers affect eternity. There is no telling where their influence stops.
Henry Adams
Image
It is always good men who do the most harm in the world.
Henry Adams
Image
They know enough who know how to learn.
Henry Adams
Image
Any schoolboy could see that man as a force must be measured by motion, from a fixed point.
Henry Adams
Image
Every man should have a fair-sized cemetary in which to bury the faults of his friends.
Henry Adams
Image
One friend in a lifetime is much two are many three are hardly possible.
Henry Adams
Image
The Jewish question is really the most serious of our problems.
Henry Adams
Image
Politics are a very unsatisfactory game.
Henry Adams
Image
The gothic is singular in this one seems easily at home in the renaissance one is not too strange in the Byzantine as for the Roman, it is ourselves and we could walk blindfolded through every chink and cranny of the Greek mind all these styles seem modern when we come close to them but the gothic gets away.
Henry Adams
Image
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
Image
History is the most aristocratic of all literary pursuits, because it obliges the historian to be rich as well as educated.
Henry Adams
Image
In correct theology, the Virgin ought not to be represented in bed, for she could not suffer like ordinary women, but her palace at Chartres is not much troubled by theology, and to her, as empress-mother, the pain of child-birth was a pleasure which she wanted her people to share.
Henry Adams
Image
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.
Henry Adams
Image
If one shed tears, they must be shed on one's pillow.
Henry Adams
Image
In the one branch he most needed
Henry Adams
Image
The outline of the city became frantic in its effort to explain something that defied meaning. Power seemed to have outgrown its servitude and to have asserted its freedom. The cylinder had exploded, and thrown great masses of stone and steam against the sky.
Henry Adams