Henry Adams

No man, however strong, can serve ten years as schoolmaster, priest, or Senator, and remain fit for anything else.

No man means all he says, and yet very few say all they mean, for words are slippery and thought is viscous.

Knowledge of human nature is the beginning and end of political education.

Nothing in education is so astonishing as the amount of ignorance it accumulates in the form of inert facts.

No man likes to have his intelligence or good faith questioned, especially if he has doubts about it himself.

Everyone carries his own inch rule of taste, and amuses himself by applying it, triumphantly, wherever he travels.

There is no such thing as an underestimate of average intelligence.

Absolute liberty is absence of restraint; responsibility is restraint; therefore, the ideally free individual is responsible to himself.

Chaos was the law of nature; Order was the dream of man.

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.

A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops.

In practice, such trifles as contradictions in principle are easily set aside; the faculty of ignoring them makes the practical man.

Silence alone is respectable and respected. I believe God to be silence.

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.

Every man should have a fair-sized cemetary in which to bury the faults of his friends.

Chaos breeds life; Order creates habit.

History is only a catalogue of the forgotten.

History will die if not irritated. The only service I can do to my profession is to serve as a flea.

Unity is vision; it must have been part of the process of learning to see.

From cradle to grave this problem of running order through chaos, direction through space, discipline through freedom, unity through multiplicity, has always been, and must always be, the task of education, as it is the moral of religion, philosophy, science, art, politics and economy; but a boy's will is his life, and he dies when it is broken, as the colt dies in harness, taking a new nature in becoming tame.

Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed. The imagination must be given not wings but weights.