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Henry Adams Zitate und Sprüche

„Niemand meint alles was er sagt, und nur wenige sagen alles was sie denken. Worte sind glitschig und Gedanken sind klebrig.“

Henry Adams buch The Education of Henry Adams

The Education of Henry Adams, 1907
Original engl.: "No one means all he says, and yet very few say all they mean, for words are slippery and thought is viscous."

Henry Adams: Zitate auf Englisch

“The complaint of the French artist against the Norman, is the "mesquin" treatment of dividing his tower into stories of equal height. Even in the twelfth century and in religious architecture, artists already struggled over the best solution to this peculiarly American problem of the twentieth century, and when tourists return to New York, they may look at the twenty-story towers which decorate the city, to see whether the Norman or the French plan has won; but this at least will be sure in advance:— the Norman will be the practical scheme which states the facts, and stops; while the French will be the graceful one, which states the beauties and more or less fits the facts to suit them.”

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Henry Adams

Mesquin: paltry, unimaginative, prosaic
Mont Saint Michel and Chartres (1904)

“Had Grant been a Congressman one would have been on one’s guard, for one knew the type. One never expected from a Congressman more than good intentions and public spirit. Newspaper-men as a rule had no great respect for the lower House; Senators had less; and Cabinet officers had none at all. Indeed, one day when Adams was pleading with a Cabinet officer for patience and tact in dealing with Representatives, the Secretary impatiently broke out: “You can’t use tact with a Congressman! A Congressman is a hog! You must take a stick and hit him on the snout!””

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Henry Adams

The Education of Henry Adams (1907)

“Paris remained Parisian in spite of change, mistress of herself though China fell. Scores of artists — sculptors and painters, poets and dramatists, workers in gems and metals, designers in stuffs and furniture — hundreds of chemists, physicists, even philosophers, philologists, physicians, and historians — were at work, a thousand times as actively as ever before, and the mass and originality of their product would have swamped any previous age, as it very nearly swamped its own; but the effect was one of chaos, and Adams stood as helpless before it as before the chaos of New York.”

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Henry Adams

The Education of Henry Adams (1907)

“"The American man is a failure! You are all failures!" he said. "Has not my sister here more sense than my brother Brooks? Is not Bessie worth two of Bay? Wouldn't we all elect Mrs. Lodge Senator against Cabot? Would the President have a ghost of a chance if Mrs. Roosevelt ran against him? Do you want to stop at the Embassy, on your way home, and ask which would run it best — Herbert or his wife?" The men laughed a little — not much! Each probably made allowance for his own wife as an unusually superior woman. Some one afterwards remarked that these half-dozen women were not a fair average. Adams replied that the half-dozen men were above all possible average; he could not lay his hands on another half-dozen their equals.”

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Henry Adams

The Education of Henry Adams (1907)

“…any woman will, under the right conditions, marry any man at any time, provided her "higher nature" is properly appealed to.”

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Henry Adams buch Democracy: An American Novel

Quelle: Democracy: An American Novel (1880), Ch. XI

“Self-possession was the strongest part of Harvard College, which certainly taught men to stand alone, so that nothing seemed stranger to its graduates than the paroxysms of terror before the public which often overcame the graduates of European universities.”

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Henry Adams

The Education of Henry Adams (1907)

“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. Even the greatest Senators seemed to inspire little personal affection in each other, and betrayed none at all.”

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Henry Adams

The Education of Henry Adams (1907)

“The English mind was like the London drawing room, a comfortable and easy spot, filled with bits and fragments of incoherent furnitures, which were never meant to go together, and could be arranged in any relation without making a whole, except by the square room. Philosophy might dispute about innate ideas till the stars died out in the sky, but about innate tastes no one, except perhaps a collie-dog, has the right to doubt; least of all the Englishman, for his tastes are his being; he drifts after them as unconsciously as a honey-bee drifts after his flowers.”

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Henry Adams

The Education of Henry Adams (1907)

“In his fancy, office was poison; it killed — body and soul — physically and socially. Office was more poisonous than priestcraft or pedagogy in proportion as it held more power; but the poison he complained of was not ambition; he shared none of Cardinal Wolsey's belated penitence for that healthy stimulant, as he had shared none of the fruits; his poison was that of the will — the distortion of sight — the warping of mind — the degradation of tissue — the coarsening of taste — the narrowing of sympathy to the emotions of a caged rat.”

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Henry Adams

The Education of Henry Adams (1907)

“Whatever was peculiar about him was education, not character, and came to him, directly and indirectly, as the result of that eighteenth-century inheritance which he took with his name.”

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Henry Adams

The Education of Henry Adams (1907)

“He had often noticed that six months' oblivion amounts to newspaper-death, and that resurrection is rare. Nothing is easier, if a man wants it, than rest, profound as the grave.”

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Henry Adams

The Education of Henry Adams (1907)

“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."”

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Henry Adams

Quelle: Esther: A Novel (1884), Ch. X, the last lines of the novel

“…each individual appeared satisfied to stand alone. It seemed a sign of force; yet to stand alone is quite natural when one has no passions; still easier when one has no pains.”

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Henry Adams

The Education of Henry Adams (1907)

“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.”

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Henry Adams

The Education of Henry Adams (1907)

“This view of the case amused Esther for a time, but not for long — the matter was too serious for any treatment but a joke, and joking made it more serious still.”

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Henry Adams

Quelle: Esther: A Novel (1884), Ch. VII

“Accident counts for much in companionship as in marriage.”

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Henry Adams

The Education of Henry Adams (1907)

“Science has become too complex to affirm the existence of universal truths, but it strives for nothing else, and disputes the problem, within its own limits, almost as earnestly as in the twelfth century, when the whole field of human and superhuman activity was shut between these barriers of Substance, Universals, and Particulars. Little has changed except the vocabulary and the method.”

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Henry Adams

Mont Saint Michel and Chartres (1904)

“That Stirling as well as Milnes should regard Swinburne as a prodigy greatly comforted Adams, who lost his balance of mind at first in trying to imagine that Swinburne was a natural product of Oxford.”

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Henry Adams

The Education of Henry Adams (1907)

“We combat obstacles in order to get repose, and, when got, the repose is insupportable.”

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Henry Adams

The Education of Henry Adams (1907)

“If there was in all France, between 1140 and 1200, a more typical Englishman of the future Church of England type than John of Salisbury, he has left no trace; and John wrote a description of his time which makes a picturesque contrast with the picture painted by Abélard, his old master, of the century at its beginning. John weighed Abélard and the Schools against Bernard and the Cloister, and coolly concluded that the way to truth lay rather through Citeaux, which brought him to Chartres as Bishop in 1176, and to a mild scepticism in faith. "I prefer to doubt," he said, "rather than rashly define what is hidden."”

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Henry Adams

Mont Saint Michel and Chartres (1904)

“One could divine pretty nearly where the force lay, since the last ten years had given to the great mechanical energies — coal, iron, steam — a distinct superiority in power over the old industrial elements — agriculture, handwork, and learning; but the result of this revolution on a survivor from the fifties resembled the action of the earthworm; he twisted about, in vain, to recover his starting-point; he could no longer see his own trail; he had become an estray; a flotsam or jetsam of wreckage; a belated reveller, or a scholar-gipsy like Matthew Arnold's. His world was dead. Not a Polish Jew fresh from Warsaw or Cracow — not a furtive Yacoob or Ysaac still reeking of the Ghetto, snarling a weird Yiddish to the officers of the customs — but had a keener instinct, an intenser energy, and a freer hand than he — American of Americans, with Heaven knew how many Puritans and Patriots behind him, and an education that had cost a civil war.”

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Henry Adams

The Education of Henry Adams (1907)

“Thus already, at ten years old, the boy found himself standing face to face with a dilemma that might have puzzled an early Christian. What was he? — where was he going? Even then he felt that something was wrong, but he concluded that it must be Boston.”

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Henry Adams

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.”

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Henry Adams

Esther Dudley's reaction to Niagara Falls, in Ch. IX
Esther: A Novel (1884)

“Langley seemed prepared for anything, even for an indeterminable number of universes interfused — physics stark mad in metaphysics.”

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Henry Adams

The Education of Henry Adams (1907)

“The true American knew something of the facts, but nothing of the feelings; he read the letter but he never felt the law.”

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Henry Adams

The Education of Henry Adams (1907)

“Strange as it sounds, although Man thought himself hardly treated in respect to freedom, yet, if freedom meant superiority, Man was in action much the superior of God, whose freedom suffered, from Saint Thomas, under restraints that Man never would have tolerated. Saint Thomas did not allow God even an undetermined will; he was pure Act, and as such he could not change. Man alone was, in act, allowed to change direction. What was more curious still, Man might absolutely prove his freedom by refusing to move at all; if he did not like his life, he could stop it, and habitually did so, or acquiesced in its being done for him; while God could not commit suicide or even cease for a single instant his continuous action. If Man had the singular fancy of making himself absurd,— a taste confined to himself but attested by evidence exceedingly strong,— he could be as absurd as he liked; but God could not be absurd. Saint Thomas did not allow the Deity the right to contradict himself, which is one of Man's chief pleasures. While Man enjoyed what was, for his purposes, an unlimited freedom to be wicked,— a privilege which, as both Church and State bitterlly complained and still complain, he has outrageously abused,— God was Goodness and could be nothing else. […] In one respect, at least, Man's freedom seemed to be not relative but absolute, for his thought was an energy paying no regard to space or time or order or object or sense; but God's thought was his act and will at once; speaking correctly, God could not think, he is. Saint Thomas would not, or could not, admit that God was Necessity, as Abélard seems to have held, but he refused to tolerate the idea of a divine maniac, free from moral obligation to himself. The atmosphere of Saint Louis surrounds the God of Saint Thomas, and its pure ether shuts out the corruption and pollution to come,— the Valois and Bourbons, the Occams and Hobbes's, the Tudors and the Medicis of an enlightened Europe.”

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Henry Adams

Mont Saint Michel and Chartres (1904)

“… the huge church […] was thundering its gospel under her eyes.To have Niagara for a rival is no joke. Hazard spoke with no such authority; and Esther's next idea was one of wonder how, after listening here, any preacher could have the confidence to preach again. "What do they know about it?" she asked herself. "Which of them can tell a story like this, or a millionth part of it?"”

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Henry Adams

Quelle: Esther: A Novel (1884), Ch. IX

“If you cannot feel the color and quality,— the union of naïveté and art,— the refinement,— the infinite delicacy and tenderness — of this little poem ["Tombeor de Notre Dame"], then nothing will matter much to you; and if you can feel it, you can feel, without more assistance, the majesty of Chartres.”

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Henry Adams

The anonymous thirteenth-century poem "Tombeor de Notre Dame", of which Adams gives a fairly detailed summary, is translated in Of the Tumbler of Our Lady and Other Miracles, edited by Alice Kemp-Welsh (London: Chatto & Windus, 1909).
Mont Saint Michel and Chartres (1904)

“…but to Adams the dynamo became a symbol of infinity. As he grew accustomed to the great gallery of machines, he began to feel the forty-foot dynamos as a moral force, much as the early Christians felt the Cross.”

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Henry Adams

The Education of Henry Adams (1907)

“The Church alone had constantly protested that anarchy was not order, that Satan was not God, that pantheism was worse than atheism, and that Unity could not be proved as a contradiction. Karl Pearson seemed to agree with the Church, but everyone else, including Newton, Darwin and Clerk-Maxwell, had sailed gaily into the supersensual.”

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Henry Adams

The Education of Henry Adams (1907)