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

Categorized in : Laughing Grieving Heart

All experience is an arch, to build upon.

Henry Adams

moving-on inspirational science

I firmly believe, that before many centuries more, science will be the master of man. The engines he will have invented will be beyond his strength to control. Someday, science shall have the existence of mankind in its power, and the human race commit suicide by blowing up the world.

Henry Adams

suicide men believe

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

race suicide science

They know enough who know how to learn.

Henry Adams

learning education teacher

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

Henry Adams

leadership education inspirational

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

Henry Adams

sarcasm sarcastic average

My belief is that science is to wreck us, and that we are like monkeys monkeying with a loaded shell; we don't in the least know or care where our practically infinite energies come from or will bring us to.

Henry Adams

technology energy science

Friends are born, not made.

Henry Adams

love friendship life

Politics, as a practise, whatever its professions, has always been the systematic organization of hatreds.

Henry Adams

politics organization hatred

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

real friendship two

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

Henry Adams

medicine philosophy order

Society is immoral and immortal; it can afford to commit any kind of folly, and indulge in any sort of vice; it cannot be killed, and the fragments that survive can always laugh at the dead.

Henry Adams

indulge-in society laughing

[Adams] supposed that, except musicians, everyone thought Beethoven a bore, as every one except mathematicians thought mathematics a bore.

Henry Adams

mathematician mathematics musician

The capacity of women to make unsuitable marriages must be considered as the cornerstone of society.

Henry Adams

cornerstones marriage capacity

I would rather starve and rot and keep the privilege of speaking the truth as I see it, than of holding all the offices that capital has to give from the presidency down.

Henry Adams

government office giving

It is now conceded that all idea of British intervention is at an end... I want to hug the army of the Potomac. I want to get the whole army of Vicksburg drunk at my own expense. I want to fight some small man and lick him.

Henry Adams

army fighting war

He too serves a certain purpose who only stands and cheers.

Henry Adams

politics cheer purpose

The Jewish question is really the most serious of our problems.

Henry Adams

jew serious problem

The chief wonder of education is that it does not ruin everybody concerned in it, teachers and taught.

Henry Adams

education teacher retirement

Every man who has at last succeeded, after long effort, in calling up the divinity which lies hidden in a woman's heart, is startled to find that he must obey the God he summoned.

Henry Adams

heart men lying