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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!

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
Enough
Evolution
Men
Fate
Ignorance
Learn
Fall
Mighty
Littles
Pray
May
God
Little
Praying

More quotes by 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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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.
Henry Adams
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The tourist was the great conservative who hated novelty and adored dirt.
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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Only on the edge of the grave can man conclude anything.
Henry Adams
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Practical politics consists in ignoring facts.
Henry Adams
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An artist's business is only to see.
Henry Adams
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A parent gives life, but as parent, gives no more. A murderer takes life, but his deed stops there. A teacher affects eternity he can never tell where his influence stops.
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The woman who is known only through a man is known wrong.
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From earliest childhood the boy was accustomed to feel that, for him, life was double. Winter and summer, town and country, law and liberty, were hostile, and the man who pretended they were not, was in his eyes a schoolmaster -- that is, a man employed to tell lies to little boys.
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His brothers were the type he was the variation.
Henry Adams
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In the history of the United States, there is no continuity at all. You can cut through it anywhere and nothing on this side of the cut has anything to do with anything on the other side.
Henry Adams
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The work of internal government has become the task of controlling the thousands of fifth-rate men.
Henry Adams
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The study of history is useful to the historian by teaching him his ignorance of women.
Henry Adams
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Man always made, and still makes, grotesque blunders in selecting and measuring forces, taken at random from the heap, but he never made a mistake in the value he set on the whole, which he symbolized as unity and worshipped as God. To this day, his attitude towards it has never changed, though science can no longer give to force a name.
Henry Adams
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Nothing in education is so astonishing as the amount of ignorance it accumulates in the form of inert facts.
Henry Adams
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A congressman is a pig. The only way to get his snout from the trough is to rap it sharply with a stick.
Henry Adams
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The People of Virginia declare and make known that the powers granted under the Constitution being derived from the People of the United States may be resumed by them whensoever the same shall be perverted to their injury or oppression and that every.
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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Of all studies, the one he would rather have avoided was that of his own mind. He knew no tragedy so heartrending as introspection.
Henry Adams