44 quotes
No honest historian can take part with--or against--the forces he has to study. To him even the extinction of the human race should be merely a fact to be grouped with other vital statistics.
The Education of Henry Adams (1907)
She fell in love with the cataract and turned to it as a confidant, not because of its beauty or power, but because it seemed to tell her a story which she longed to understand.
Esther: A Novel (1884)
Nothing in education is so astonishing as the amount of ignorance it accumulates in the form of inert facts.
I have faith; not perhaps in the old dogmas, but in the new ones; faith in human nature; faith in science; faith in the survival of the fittest. Let us be true to our time, Mrs. Lee!
Democracy: An American Novel (1880)
For reasons which many persons thought ridiculous, Mrs. Lightfoot Lee decided to pass the winter in Washington. She was in excellent health, but she said that the climate would do her good.
Democracy: An American Novel (1880)
Who, then, is right? How can we all be right? Half of our wise men declare that the world is going straight to perdition; the other half that it is fast becoming perfect. Both cannot be right.
Democracy: An American Novel (1880)
No sand-blast of science had yet skimmed off the epidermis of history, thought, and feeling.
The Education of Henry Adams (1918)
Philosophy … consists chiefly in suggesting unintelligible answers to insoluble problems.
The Education of Henry Adams (1907)
Even theologians — even the great theologians of the thirteenth century, — even Saint Thomas Aquinas himself — did not trust to faith alone, or assume the existence of God.
Mont Saint Michel and Chartres (1904)
As for broken hearts, no self-respecting young woman shows such an ornament at any well regulated breakfast-table; they are kept in dark drawers and closets like other broken furniture.
Esther: A Novel (1884)
Mystery for mystery science beats religion hollow. I can't open my mouth in my lecture-room without repeating ten times as many unintelligible formulas as ever Hazard is forced to do in his church.
Esther: A Novel (1884)
...any woman will, under the right conditions, marry any man at any time, provided her "higher nature" is properly appealed to.
Democracy: An American Novel (1880)
Women have, commonly, a very positive moral sense; that which they will, is right; that which they reject, is wrong; and their will, in most cases, ends by settling the moral.
The Education of Henry Adams (1918)
Man has mounted science, and is now run away with...Someday science may have the existence of mankind in its power, and the human race commit suicide, by blowing up the world.
I am an anarchist in politics and an impressionist in art as well as a symbolist in literature. Not that I understand what these terms mean, but I take them to be all merely synonyms of pessimist.
His views, policy and purposes were sometimes even more astounding than his curious gaps or lapses of omniscience. On the whole, the relation was the queerest that Henry Adams ever kept up.
Energy had a way of coming and going in phases of intensity much more mysterious than the energy itself.
The Degradation of the Democratic Dogma (1919)
Wharton was captivated by her sweet face, and tried to make her understand his theory that the merit of a painting was not so much in what it explained as in what it suggested.
Esther: A Novel (1884)
The force of the Virgin was still felt at Lourdes, and seemed to be as potent as X-rays; but in America neither Venus nor Virgin ever had value as force — at most as sentiment. No American had ever been truly afraid of either.
Esther looked at him with an expression that would have been a smile if it had not been infinitely dreary and absent; then she said, simply and finally:
"But George, I don't love you, I love him."
Esther: A Novel (1884)