Quote

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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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
Heart
Suffering
Seemed
Expenses
Life
Society
Jokes
Mask
Lasts
Hearts
Practicals
Last
Mystery
Practical
Initiate
Success
Months
Joke
Fraternity
Moment
Laughing
Drop
Ache
Moments
Coming
Vast
Expense
Three
Though
Suffer
Grieving

More quotes by Henry Adams

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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.
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Wild as man was, and disgusting as the more degraded tribes and communities were, the best of them, and all those from which further advance came, were marked by good qualities, or they could never have risen to a higher stage.
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The best date movies give you something to talk about. A movie that's a downer is a great way to find out about someone.
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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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Chaos was the law of nature Order was the dream of man.
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The new American, like the new European, was the servant of the powerhouse, as the European of the twelfth century was the servant of the Church.
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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.
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Nothing in education is so astonishing as the amount of ignorance it accumulates in the form of inert facts.
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American politics is a struggle, not of men but of forces. The men become every year more and more creatures of force, massed about central power houses.
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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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Although the Senate is much given to admiring in its members a superiority less obvious or quite invisible to outsiders, one Senator seldom proclaims his own inferiority to another, and still more seldom likes to be told of it.
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The Indian Summer of life should be a little sunny and a little sad, like the season, and infinite in wealth and depth of tone, but never hustled.
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Teachers affect eternity. There is no telling where their influence stops.
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Those who seek education in the paths of duty are always deceived by the illusion that power in the hands of friends is an advantage to them.
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You may cut off the heads of every rich man now living--of every statesman--every literary, and every scientific authority, without in the least changing the social situation. Artists, of course, disappeared long ago as social forces. So did the church. Corporations are not elevators, but levellers, as I see them.
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Some day science may have the existence of mankind in its power, and the human race commit suicide, by blowing up the world.
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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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Only on the edge of the grave can man conclude anything.
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No historian can take part with--or against--the forces he has to study. To him even the extinction of the human race should merely be a fact to be grouped with other vital statistics.
Henry Adams
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The Jewish question is really the most serious of our problems.
Henry Adams