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Henry Brooks Adams war ein US-amerikanischer Historiker und Kulturphilosoph. Er war Mitglied der bekannten Familie Adams. Wikipedia  

✵ 16. Februar 1838 – 27. März 1918  •  Andere Namen Henry Brooks Adams, 亨利·亞當斯
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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

“That the American, by temperament, worked to excess, was true; work and whiskey were his stimulants; work was a form of vice; but he never cared much for money or power after he earned them. The amusement of the pursuit was all the amusement he got from it.”

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Henry Adams

The Education of Henry Adams (1907)

“Indeed, had his father kept the boy at home, and given him half an hour's direction every day, he would have done more for him than school ever could do for them. Of course, school-taught men and boys looked down on home-bred boys, and rather prided themselves on their own ignorance, but the man of sixty can generally see what he needed in life, and in Henry Adams's opinion it was not school.”

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Henry Adams

The Education of Henry Adams (1907)

“…the outpourings of Elisée Reclus were ideals of the French ouvrier, diluted with absinthe, resulting in a bourgeois dream of order and inertia. Neither made a pretence of anarchy except as a momentary stage towards order and unity. Neither of them had formed any other conception of the universe than what they had inherited from the priestly class to which their minds obviously belonged. With them, as with the socialist, communist, or collectivist, the mind that followed nature had no relation.”

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Henry Adams

The Education of Henry Adams (1907)

“So Henry Adams, well aware that he could not succeed as a scholar, and finding his social position beyond improvement or need of effort, betook himself to the single ambition which otherwise would scarcely have seemed a true outcome of the college, though it was the last remnant of the old Unitarian supremacy. He took to the pen. He wrote.”

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Henry Adams

The Education of Henry Adams (1907)

“For a hundred and fifty years the Virgin and Queens ruled French taste and thought so successfully that the French man has never yet quite decided whether to be more proud or ashamed of it. Life has ever since seemed a little flat to him, and art a little cheap. He saw that the woman, in elevating herself, had made him appear ridiculous, and he tried to retaliate with a wit not always sparkling, and too often at his own expense.”

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Henry Adams

Mont Saint Michel and Chartres (1904)

“The Class of 1858, to which Henry Adams belonged, was a typical collection of young New Englanders, quietly penetrating and aggressively commonplace; free from meannesses, jealousies, intrigues, enthusiasms, and passions; not exceptionally quick; not consciously skeptical; singularly indifferent to display, artifice, florid expression, but not hostile to it when it amused them; distrustful of themselves, but little disposed to trust any one else; with not much humor of their own, but full of readiness to enjoy the humor of others; negative to a degree that in the long run became positive and triumphant. Not harsh in manners or judgment, rather liberal and open-minded, they were still as a body the most formidable critics one would care to meet, in a long life exposed to criticism.”

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Henry Adams

The Education of Henry Adams (1907)

“As a means of variation from a normal type, sickness in childhood ought to have a certain value not to be classed under any fitness or unfitness of natural selection; and especially scarlet fever affected boys seriously, both physically and in character, though they might through life puzzle themselves to decide whether it had fitted or unfitted them for success.”

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Henry Adams

The Education of Henry Adams (1907)

“I am never afraid of pure atheism; it is the flabby kind of sentimental deism that annoys me, because it is as slippery as air.”

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Henry Adams

The Rev. Stephen Hazard in Ch. VIII
Esther: A Novel (1884)

“Adams could no more interest Algernon Swinburne than he could interest Encke's comet. To Swinburne he could be no more than a worm. The quality of genius was an education almost ultimate, for one touched there the limits of the human mind on that side; but one could only receive; one had nothing to give — nothing even to offer.”

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Henry Adams

The Education of Henry Adams (1907)

“… the affectation of readiness for death is a stage rôle, and stoicism is a stupid resource though the only one. Non dolet, Pæte! One is ashamed of it even in the acting.”

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Henry Adams

The Education of Henry Adams (1907)

“There as elsewhere a cruel universe combined to crush a child. As though three or four vigorous brothers and sisters, with the best will, were not enough to crush any child, every one else conspired towards an education which he hated. 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. Rarely has the boy felt kindly towards his tamers. Between him and his master has always been war. Henry Adams never knew a boy of his generation to like a master, and the task of remaining on friendly terms with one's own family, in such a relation, was never easy.”

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Henry Adams

The Education of Henry Adams (1907)

“Society hesitated, wavered, oscillated between harshness and laxity, pitilessly sacrificing the weak, and deferentially following the strong.”

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Henry Adams

The Education of Henry Adams (1907)

“Charles Francis Adams's memory was hardly above the average; his mind was not bold like his grandfather's or restless like his father's, or imaginative or oratorical — still less mathematical; but it worked with singular perfection, admirable self-restraint, and instinctive mastery of form. Within its range it was a model.”

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Henry Adams

The Education of Henry Adams (1907)

“Barred from philosophy and bored by facts, he wanted to teach his students something not wholly useless. The number of students whose minds were of an order above the average was, in his experience, barely one in ten; the rest could not be much stimulated by any inducements a teacher could suggest. All were respectable, and in seven years of contact, Adams never had cause to complain of one; but nine minds in ten take polish passively, like a hard surface; only the tenth sensibly reacts.”

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Henry Adams

The Education of Henry Adams (1907)

“Society swarmed with exaggerated characters; it contained little else.

Often this eccentricity bore all the marks of strength; perhaps it was actual exuberance of force, a birthmark of genius. Boston thought so. The Bostonian called it national character — native vigor — robustness — honesty — courage. He respected and feared it.”

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Henry Adams

The Education of Henry Adams (1907)

“From early childhood his moral principles had struggled blindly with his interests, but he was certain of one law that ruled all others — masses of men invariably follow interests in deciding morals. Morality is a private and costly luxury.”

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Henry Adams

The Education of Henry Adams (1907)

“All the steam in the world could not, like the Virgin, build Chartres.”

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Henry Adams

The Education of Henry Adams (1907)

“…no number of centuries could ever educate him to Swinburne's level, even in technical appreciation.”

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Henry Adams

The Education of Henry Adams (1907)

“An artist must be man, woman and demi-god.”

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Henry Adams

Mr. Wharton in Ch. IV
Esther: A Novel (1884)

“He was a banker, and towards bankers Adams felt the narrow prejudice which the serf feels to his overseer; for he knew he must obey, and he knew that the helpless showed only their helplessness when they tempered obedience by mockery. The world, after 1865, became a bankers' world.”

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Henry Adams

The Education of Henry Adams (1907)

“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.”

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Henry Adams buch Democracy: An American Novel

Madeleine Lee in Ch. IV
Democracy: An American Novel (1880)

“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.”

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Henry Adams

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

“Average human nature is very coarse, and its ideals must necessarily be average. The world never loved perfect poise. What the world does love is commonly absence of poise, for it has to be amused.”

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Henry Adams

The Education of Henry Adams (1907)

“Socialism, communism, collectivism, philosophical anarchism, which promised paradise on earth for every male, cut off the few avenues of escape which capitalism had opened to the woman, and she saw before her only the future reserved for machine-made, collectivist females.”

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Henry Adams

The Education of Henry Adams (1907)

“Nothing new was to be done or learned there, and the world hurried on to its telephones, bicycles, and electric trams. At past fifty, Adams solemnly and painfully learned to ride the bicycle.”

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Henry Adams

The Education of Henry Adams (1907)

“Among the thirteenth-century windows the Western Rose alone seems to affect a rivalry in brilliance with the lancets, and carries it so far that the separate medallions and pictures are quite lost,— especially in direct sunshine,— blending in a confused effect of opals, in a delirium of color and light, with a result like a cluster of stones in jewelry. Assuming as one must, in want of the artist's instruction, that he knew what he wanted to do, and did it, one must take for granted that he treated the Rose as a whole, and aimed at giving it harmony with the three precious windows beneath. The effect is that of a single large ornament; a round breastpin, or what is now called a sun-burst, of jewels, with three large pendants beneath.”

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Henry Adams

Mont Saint Michel and Chartres (1904)

“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!”

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Henry Adams buch Democracy: An American Novel

Nathan Gore in Ch. IV
Democracy: An American Novel (1880)

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