Background Image

...

The Hymns Of David, The Plays Of Shakespeare, The Metaphysics Of Descartes, The Crimes Of Borgia, The Virtues Of Antonine, The Atheism Of Yesterday And The Materialism Of Today, Were All Emanations Of Divine Thought, Doing Their Appointed Work. It Was The Duty Of The Church To Deal With Them All, Not As Though They Existed Through A Power Hostile To The Deity, But As Instruments Of The Deity To Work Out His Unrevealed Ends.

-Henry Adams

...

Please Wait....
Translating....

The Hymns Of David,

Henry Adams

...

The Hymns Of David, The Plays Of Shakespeare, The Metaphysics Of Descartes, The Crimes Of Borgia, The Virtues Of Antonine, The Atheism Of Yesterday And The Materialism Of Today, Were All Emanations Of Divine Thought, Doing Their Appointed Work. It Was The Duty Of The Church To Deal With Them All, Not As Though They Existed Through A Power Hostile To The Deity, But As Instruments Of The Deity To Work Out His Unrevealed Ends.

Views: 25446

Topic

More From Henry Adams

History Will Die If Not Irritated. The Only Service I Can Do To My Profession Is To Serve As A Flea.

Teachers Affect Eternity. There Is No Telling Where Their Influence Stops.

Unbroken Evolution Under Uniform Conditions Pleased Every One -- Except Curates And Bishops; It Was The Very Best Substitute For Religion; A Safe, Conservative Practical, Thoroughly Common-law Deity.

The Idea That Any Personal Deity Could Find Pleasure Or Profit In Torturing A Poor Woman, By Accident, With A Fiendish Cruelty Known To Man Only In Perverted And Insane Temperaments, Could Not Be Held For A Moment. For Pure Blasphemy, It Made Pure Atheism A Comfort.

Some Day Science May Have The Existence Of Mankind In Its Power, And The Human Race Commit Suicide, By Blowing Up The World.

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.

Young Men Have A Passion For Regarding Their Elders As Senile.

It [love] Is A Disease To Be Born With Patience, Like Any Nervous Complaint, And To Be Treated With Counter-irritants.

They Know Enough Who Know How To Learn.

Education Should Try To Lessen The Obstacles, Diminish The Friction, Invigorate The Energy, And Should Train Minds To React, Not At Haphazard, But By Choice, On The Lines Of Force That Attract Their World. What One Knows Is, In Youth, Of Little Moment; They Know Enough Who Know How To Learn.

I Have Written Too Much History To Have Faith In It; And If Anyone Thinks I'm Wrong, I Am Inclined To Agree With Him.

The Less A Tourist Knows, The Fewer Mistakes He Need Make, For He Will Not Expect Himself To Explain Ignorance.

As A Historian, He Felt It His Duty To Respect Everything That Had Ever Been Respected, Except For The Occasional Statesman.

Only On The Edge Of The Grave Can Man Conclude Anything.

The Gothic Is Singular In This; One Seems Easily At Home In The Renaissance; One Is Not Too Strange In The Byzantine; As For The Roman, It Is Ourselves; And We Could Walk Blindfolded Through Every Chink And Cranny Of The Greek Mind; All These Styles Seem Modern When We Come Close To Them; But The Gothic Gets Away.

[p]olitical And Social And Scientific Values ... Should Be Correlated In Some Relation Of Movement That Could Be Expressed In Mathematics, Nor Did One Care In The Least That All The World Said It Could Not Be Done, Or That One Knew Not Enough Mathematics Even To Figure A Formula Beyond The Schoolboy S=(1/2)gt2. If Kepler And Newton Could Take Liberties With The Sun And Moon, An Obscure Person ... Could Take Liberties With Congress, And Venture To Multiply Its Attraction Into The Square Of Its Time. He Had Only To Find A Value, Even Infinitesimal, For Its Attraction.

The Effect Of Power And Publicity On All Men Is The Aggravation Of Self, A Sort Of Tumor That Ends By Killing The Victim's Sympathies.

Man Always Made, And Still Makes, Grotesque Blunders In Selecting And Measuring Forces, Taken At Random From The Heap, But He Never Made A Mistake In The Value He Set On The Whole, Which He Symbolized As Unity And Worshipped As God. To This Day, His Attitude Towards It Has Never Changed, Though Science Can No Longer Give To Force A Name.

There Is No Such Thing As An Underestimate Of Average Intelligence.

After Gibbs, One The Most Distinguished [american Scientists] Was Langley, Of The Smithsonian. ... He Had The Physicist's Heinous Fault Of Professing To Know Nothing Between Flashes Of Intense Perception. ... Rigidly Denying Himself The Amusement Of Philosophy, Which Consists Chiefly In Suggesting Unintelligible Answers To Insoluble Problems, And Liked To Wander Past Them In A Courteous Temper, Even Bowing To Them Distantly As Though Recognizing Their Existence, While Doubting Their Respectibility.

Accident Counts For As Much In Companionship As In Marriage.

The Sensation Of Seeing Extremely Fine Women, With Superb Forms, Perfectly Unconscious Of Undress, And Yet Evidently Aware Of Their Beauty And Dignity, Is Worth A Week's Seasickness To Experience... [to Me] The Effect [of A Siva Dance] Was That Of A Dozen Rembrandts Intensified Into The Most Glowing Beauty Of Life And Motion.

Any Schoolboy Could See That Man As A Force Must Be Measured By Motion, From A Fixed Point.

Energy Is The Inherent Effort Of Every Multiplicity To Become Unity.

In The One Branch He Most Needed

All Experience Is An Arch, To Build Upon.

The Woman Had Once Been Supreme; In France She Still Seemed Potent, Not Merely As A Sentiment But As A Force; Why Was She Unknownin America? For Evidently America Was Ashamed Of Her, And She Was Ashamed Of Herself, Otherwise They Would Not Have Strewn Fig-leaves So Profusely All Over Her. When She Was A True Force, She Was Ignorant Of Fig-leaves, But The Monthly-magazine-made American Female Had Not A Feature That Would Have Been Recognized By Adam. The Trait Was Notorious, And Often Humorous, But Anyone Brought Up Among Puritans Knew That Sex Was Sin. In Any Previous Age, Sex Was Strength.

Chaos Was The Law Of Nature; Order Was The Dream Of Man.

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.

During An Election Campaign The Air Is Full Of Speeches And Vice Versa.

Politics, As A Practise, Whatever Its Professions, Has Always Been The Systematic Organization Of Hatreds.

Probably The Institution Of Marriage Had Its Origin In Love Of Property. Both Men And Women Were United In This--that Whatever They Loved Best, They Wished To Possess. The Usual Theory Holds That The Communal System Would Not Permit The Gratification Of This Desire At The Expense Of Communal Rights, And That Therefore Men Were Driven To Gratify Their Passion By Purchasing Or By Capturing Women From Neighboring And Hostile Tribes.

A Senator Is Like A Begonia - Showy But Useless.

The Spectacle [of American Politics] Resembles That Of Swarms Of Insects Changing From Worms To Wings. They Must Get The Wings Ordie. For Our Salvation, Mr. Wilbur Wright Is Providing Wings. He Will Also Have To Provide A New Insect To Use Them.

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.

Laplace Would Have Found It Child's-play To Fix A Ratio Of Progression In Mathematical Science Between Descartes, Leibnitz, Newton And Himself

Modern Politics Is, At Bottom, A Struggle Not Of Men But Of Forces. The Men Become Every Year More And More Creatures Of Force, Massed About Central Powerhouses. The Conflict Is No Longer Between The Men, But Between The Motors That Drive The Men, And The Men Tend To Succumb To Their Own Motive Forces.

The Hymns Of David, The Plays Of Shakespeare, The Metaphysics Of Descartes, The Crimes Of Borgia, The Virtues Of Antonine, The Atheism Of Yesterday And The Materialism Of Today, Were All Emanations Of Divine Thought, Doing Their Appointed Work. It Was The Duty Of The Church To Deal With Them All, Not As Though They Existed Through A Power Hostile To The Deity, But As Instruments Of The Deity To Work Out His Unrevealed Ends.

Throughout Human History The Waste Of Mind Has Been Appalling, And, As This Story Is Meant To Show, Society Has Conspired To Promote It. No Doubt The Teacher Is The Worst Criminal, But The World Stands Behind Him And Drags The Student From His Course.

The Proper Study Of Mankind Is Woman.

Man Is An Imperceptible Atom Always Trying To Become One With God.

To My Fancy, One Looks Back On Life, It Has Only Two Responsibilities, Which Include All The Others: One Is The Bringing Of New Life Into Existence; The Other, Educating It After It Is Brought In. All Betrayals Of Trust Result From These Original Sins.

My Own Conclusion Is That History Is Simply Social Development Along The Lines Of Weakest Resistance, And That In Most Cases The Line Of Weakest Resistance Is Found As Unconsciously By Society As By Water.

If I Grapple With Sin In My Own Strength, The Devil Knows He May Go To Sleep.

If Any One Of Us Has Had An Ambition Higher Than That Of Making Money; A Motive Better Than That Of Expediency; A Faith Warmer Than That Of Reasoning; A Love Purer Than That Of The Self; He Has Been Slow To Express It; Still Slower To Urge It.

Knowledge Of Human Nature Is The Beginning And End Of Political Education.

Beginnings And Ends

Silence Alone Is Respectable And Respected. I Believe God To Be Silence.

No Man Means All He Says, And Yet Very Few Say All They Mean, For Words Are Slippery And Thought Is Viscous.

One Friend In A Lifetime Is Much; Two Are Many; Three Are Hardly Possible.

I Want To Be Advertised And The Easiest Way Is To Do Something Obnoxious And Do It Well.

He Too Serves A Certain Purpose Who Only Stands And Cheers.

Of All Studies, The One He Would Rather Have Avoided Was That Of His Own Mind. He Knew No Tragedy So Heartrending As Introspection.

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.

Mathematicians Practice Absolute Freedom.

If It Were Worth While To Argue A Paradox, One Might Maintain That Nature Regards The Female As The Essential, The Male As The Superfluity Of Her World. Perhaps The Best Starting-point For Study Of The Virgin Would Be A Practical Acquaintance With Bees, And Especially With Queen Bees.

The Great Word Evolution Had Not Yet, In 1860, Made A New Religion Of History, But The Old Religion Had Preached The Same Doctrinefor A Thousand Years Without Finding In The Entire History Of Rome Anything But Flat Contradiction.

Power When Wielded By Abnormal Energy Is The Most Serious Of Facts.

I Hate Photographs Abstractly, Because They Have Given Me More Ideas Perversely And Immovably Wrong, Than I Ever Should Get By Imagination.

No Man, However Strong, Can Serve Ten Years As Schoolmaster, Priest, Or Senator, And Remain Fit For Anything Else. All The Dogmatic Stations In Life Have The Effect Of Fixing A Certain Stiffness Of Attitude Forever, As Though They Mesmerised The Subject.

All Taxation Is An Evil, But Heavy Taxes, Indiscriminately Levied On Every Everything Are One Of The Greatest Curses That Can Afflict A People

The New American, Like The New European, Was The Servant Of The Powerhouse, As The European Of The Twelfth Century Was The Servant Of The Church.

The Common View Of Marriage As A Primitive Institution Implies In The Man More Than Arbitrary Superiority, Such As He Exercised Over The Child, Which Still Remained Free. The Woman's Slavery Was Assumed To Be For Life.

Power Is Poison. Its Effect On Presidents Has Been Always Tragic, Chiefly As An Almost Indecent Excitement At First, And A Worse Reaction Afterwards; But Also Because No Mind Is So Well Balanced As To Bear The Strain Of Seizing Unlimited Force Without Habit Or Knowledge Of It; And Finding It Disputed With Him By Hungry Packs Of Wolves And Hounds Whose Lives Depend On Snatching The Carion.

History Is Only A Catalogue Of The Forgotten.

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.

The Difference Is Slight, To The Influence Of An Author, Whether He Is Read By Five Hundred Readers, Or By Five Hundred Thousand; If He Can Select The Five Hundred, He Reaches The Five Hundred Thousand.

His Brothers Were The Type; He Was The Variation.

The Photograph Is A Coarse Fraud, And Seems To Delight Only In Taking The Whole Beauty Out Of The Picture.

You Can't Use Tact With A Congressman! A Congressman Is A Hog! You Must Take A Stick And Hit Him On The Snout!

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.

Analogies Are Figures Intended To Serve As Fatal Weapons If They Succeed, And As Innocent Toys If They Fail.

The Whole Fabric Of Society Will Go To Wrack If We Really Lay Hands Of Reform On Our Rotten Institutions. From Top To Bottom The Whole System Is A Fraud, All Of Us Know It, Laborers And Capitalists Alike, And All Of Us Are Consenting Parties To It.

Man Loves Most That Which Is His Own.

As For America, It Is The Ideal Fruit Of All Your Youthful Hopes And Reforms. Everybody Is Fairly Decent, Respectable, Domestic, Bourgeois, Middle-class, And Tiresome. There Is Absolutely Nothing To Revile Except That It's A Bore.

There Have Been Times When The Church Seemed Afraid, But She Is No Longer. Analyze, Dissect, Use Your Microscope Or Your Spectrum Till The Last Atom Of Matter Is Reached; Reflect And Refine Till The Last Element Of Thought Is Made Clear; The Church Now Knows With The Certainty Of Science What She Once Knew Only By The Certainty Of Faith, That You Will Find Enthroned Behind All Thought And Matter Only One Central Idea--that Idea Which The Church Has Never Ceased To Embody--i Am!

Absolute Liberty Is Absence Of Restraint; Responsibility Is Restraint; Therefore, The Ideally Free Individual Is Responsible To Himself.

A Parent Gives Life, But As Parent, Gives No More. A Murderer Takes Life, But His Deed Stops There. A Teacher Affects Eternity; He Can Never Tell Where His Influence Stops.

Power Is Poison. Its Effect On Presidents Had Always Been Tragic.

The People Of Virginia Declare And Make Known That The Powers Granted Under The Constitution Being Derived From The People Of The United States May Be Resumed By Them Whensoever The Same Shall Be Perverted To Their Injury Or Oppression And That Every.

For After All Man Knows Mighty Little, And May Some Day Learn Enough Of His Own Ignorance To Fall Down Again And Pray. Not That Icare. Only, If Such Is God's Will, And Fate And Evolution--let There Be God!

The First Serious Consciousness Of Nature's Gesture - Her Attitude Towards Life-took Form Then As A Phantasm, A Nightmare, All Insanity Of Force. For The First Time, The Stage-scenery Of The Senses Collapsed; The Human Mind Felt Itself Stripped Naked, Vibrating In A Void Of Shapeless Energies, With Resistless Mass, Colliding, Crushing, Wasting, And Destroying What These Same Energies Had Created And Labored From Eternity To Perfect.

A Congressman Is A Pig. The Only Way To Get His Snout From The Trough Is To Rap It Sharply With A Stick.

History Is A Tangled Skein That One May Take Up At Any Point, And Break When One Has Unravelled Enough.

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.

Every Man Should Have A Fair-sized Cemetary In Which To Bury The Faults Of His Friends.

For Reasons Which Many Persons Thought Ridiculous, Mrs. Lightfoot Lee Decided To Pass The Winter In Washington.

American Politics Is A Struggle, Not Of Men But Of Forces. The Men Become Every Year More And More Creatures Of Force, Massed About Central Power Houses.

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.

The Press Is The Hired Agent Of A Monied System, And Set Up For No Other Purpose Than To Tell Lies Where Their Interests Are Involved. One Can Trust Nobody And Nothing.

Those Who Seek Education In The Paths Of Duty Are Always Deceived By The Illusion That Power In The Hands Of Friends Is An Advantage To Them.

No Historian Can Take Part With--or Against--the Forces He Has To Study. To Him Even The Extinction Of The Human Race Should Merely Be A Fact To Be Grouped With Other Vital Statistics.

The Capacity Of Women To Make Unsuitable Marriages Must Be Considered As The Cornerstone Of Society.

The Outline Of The City Became Frantic In Its Effort To Explain Something That Defied Meaning. Power Seemed To Have Outgrown Its Servitude And To Have Asserted Its Freedom. The Cylinder Had Exploded, And Thrown Great Masses Of Stone And Steam Against The Sky.

Just As The French Of The Nineteenth Century Invested Their Surplus Capital In A Railway-system In The Belief That They Would Makemoney By It In This Life, In The Thirteenth They Trusted Their Money To The Queen Of Heaven Because Of Their Belief In Her Power To Repay It With Interest In The Life To Come.

Charles Sumner's Mind Had Reached The Calm Of Water Which Receives And Reflects Images Without Absorbing Them; It Contains Nothing But Itself.

Every One Must Bear His Own Universe, And Most Persons Are Moderately Interested In Learning How Their Neighbors Have Managed To Carry Theirs.

A Teacher Affects Eternity; He Can Never Tell Where His Influence Stops.

Nothing Is More Tiresome Than A Superannuated Pedagogue.

The Chief Wonder Of Education Is That It Does Not Ruin Everybody Concerned In It, Teachers And Taught.

You May Cut Off The Heads Of Every Rich Man Now Living--of Every Statesman--every Literary, And Every Scientific Authority, Without In The Least Changing The Social Situation. Artists, Of Course, Disappeared Long Ago As Social Forces. So Did The Church. Corporations Are Not Elevators, But Levellers, As I See Them.

Mr Jefferson Meant That The American System Should Be A Democracy, And He Would Rather Have Let The Whole World Perish Than That This Principle, Which To Him Represented All That Man Was Worth, Should Fail. Mr Hamilton Considered Democracy A Fatal Curse, And Meant To Stop Its Progress.

Everyone Carries His Own Inch Rule Of Taste, And Amuses Himself By Applying It, Triumphantly, Wherever He Travels.

American Art, Like The American Language And American Education, Was As Far As Possible Sexless.

American Language

History Is Only A Value Of Relation.

The American Man Is A Very Simple And Cheap Mechanism. The American Woman I Find A Complicated And Expensive One. Contrasts Of Feminine Types Are Possible. I Am Not Absolutely Sure That There Is More Than One American Man.

Thank God, I Never Was Cheerful. I Come From The Happy Stock Of The Mathers, Who, As You Remember, Passed Sweet Mornings Reflecting On The Goodness Of God And The Damnation Of Infants.

Politics Are A Very Unsatisfactory Game.

Wild As Man Was, And Disgusting As The More Degraded Tribes And Communities Were, The Best Of Them, And All Those From Which Further Advance Came, Were Marked By Good Qualities, Or They Could Never Have Risen To A Higher Stage.

Practical Politics Consists In Ignoring Facts.

[p]hilosophy . . .consists Chiefly In Suggesting Unintelligible Answers To Insoluble Problems.

At The Utmost, The Active-minded Young Man Should Ask Of His Teacher Only Mastery Of His Tools. The Young Man Himself, The Subject Of Education, Is A Certain Form Of Energy; The Object To Be Gained Is Economy Of His Force; The Training Is Partly The Clearing Away Of Obstacles, Partly The Direct Application Of Effort. Once Acquired, The Tools And Models May Be Thrown Away.

The Virgin Filled So Enormous A Space In The Life And Thought Of The Time That One Stands Now Helpless Before The Mass Of Testimony To Her Direct Action And Constant Presence In Every Moment And Form Of The Illusion Which Men Thought They Thought Their Existence.

Intimates Are Predestined.

Chaos Often Breeds Life, When Order Breeds Habit.

People Here Are Quite Struck Aback At Sunday's News Of The Capture Of New Orleans. It Took Them Three Days To Make Up Their Minds To Believe It. The Division Of American Had Become An Idea So Fixed That They Had About Shut Out All The Avenues To The Reception Of Any Other.

A Society In Stable Equilibrium Is-by Definition-one That Has No History And Wants No Historians.

I Tell You The Solemn Truth, That The Doctrine Of The Trinity Is Not So Difficult To Accept For A Working Proposition As Any One Of The Axioms Of Physics.

The Best Date Movies Give You Something To Talk About. A Movie That's A Downer Is A Great Way To Find Out About Someone.

A Period Of About Twelve Years Measured The Beat Of The Pendulum. After The Declaration Of Independence, Twelve Years Had Been Needed To Create An Efficient Constitution; Another Twelve Years Of Energy Brought A Reaction Against The Government Then Created; A Third Period Of Twelve Years Was Ending In A Sweep Toward Still Greater Energy; And Already A Child Could Calculate The Result Of A Few More Such Returns.

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.

Sunny Afternoon

Modern Politics Is, At Bottom, A Struggle Not Of Men But Of Forces.

I Am Not Prepared To Deny Or Assert Any Proposition Which Concerns Myself; But Certainly This Solitary Struggle With Platitudinous Atoms, Called Men And Women By Courtesy, Leads Me To Wish For My Wife Again. How Did I Ever Hit On The Only Woman In The World Who Fits My Cravings And Never Sounds Hollow Anywhere? Social Chemistry-the Mutual Attraction Of Equivalent Human Molecules-is A Science Yet To Be Created, For The Fact Is My Daily Study And Only Satisfaction In Life.

Satisfaction In Life

A Friend In Power Is A Friend Lost.

Artists... Disappeared Long Ago As Social Forces. So Did The Church.

Every One Who Marries Goes It Blind, More Or Less.

The Jewish Question Is Really The Most Serious Of Our Problems.

The World Is Coming To An End In 1950.

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.

Nothing Is Easier Than To Teach Historical Method, But, When Learned, It Has Little Use.

If Our Minds Could Get Hold Of One Abstract Truth, They Would Be Immortal So Far As That Truth Is Concerned. My Trouble Is To Find Out How We Can Get Hold Of The Truth At All.

Friends Are Born, Not Made.

I Think That Lee Should Have Been Hanged. It Was All The Worse That He Was A Good Man And A Fine Character And Acted Conscientiously... It's Always The Good Men Who Do The Most Harm In The World.

All State Education Is A Sort Of Dynamo Machine For Polarizing The Popular Mind; For Turning And Holding Its Lines Of Force In The Direction Supposed To Be Most Effective For State Purposes.

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.

You Say That Love Is Nonsense. I Tell You It Is No Such Thing. For Weeks And Months It Is A Steady Physical Pain, An Ache About The Heart, Never Leaving One, By Night Or By Day; A Long Strain On One's Nerves Like Toothache Or Rheumatism, Not Intolerable At Any One Instant, But Exhausting By Its Steady Drain On The Strength.

The Philosopher Says--i Am, And The Church Scouts His Philosophy. She Answers:--no! You Are Not, You Have No Existence Of Your Own. You Were And Are And Ever Will Be Only A Part Of The Supreme I Am, Of Which The Church Is The Emblem.

Nature, To Be Commanded, Must Be Obeyed. The Imagination Must Be Given Not Wings But Weights.

Whenever A Man Reaches The Top Of The Political Ladder, His Enemies Unite To Pull Him Down. His Friends Become Critical And Exacting.

Teachers Affect Eternity; No One Can Tell Where Their Influence Stops.

Henry James Chews More Than He Bites Off.

The Social Side Of Washington Was To Be Taken For Granted As Three-fourths Of Existence. Politics And Reform Became The Detail, And Waltzing The Profession

One Does Every Day And Without A Second Thought, What At Another Time Would Be The Event Of A Year, Perhaps Of A Life.

[after Viewing The Palace Of Electricity At The 1900 Trocadero Exposition In Paris] [saint-gaudens And Matthew Arnold] Felt A Railway Train As Power; Yet They, And All Other Artists, Constantly Complained That The Power Embodied In A Railway Train Could Never Be Embodied In Art. All The Steam In The World Could Not, Like The Virgin, Build Chartres.

In Practice, Such Trifles As Contradictions In Principle Are Easily Set Aside; The Faculty Of Ignoring Them Makes The Practical Man.

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.

My Favorite Figure Of The American Author Is That Of A Man Who Breeds A Favorite Dog, Which He Throws Into The Mississippi River For The Pleasure Of Making A Splash. The River Does Not Splash, But It Drowns The Dog.

Morality Is A Private And Costly Luxury.

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.

As For Piracy, I Love To Be Pirated. It Is The Greatest Compliment An Author Can Have. The Wholesale Piracy Of Democracy Was The Single Real Triumph Of My Life. Anyone May Steal What He Likes From Me.

If Washington Were President Now, He Would Have To Learn Our Ways Or Lose His Next Election. Only Fools And Theorists Imagine That Our Society Can Be Handled With Gloves Or Long Poles. One Must Make One's Self A Part Of It. If Virtue Won't Answer Our Purpose, We Must Use Vice, Or Our Opponents Will Put Us Out Of Office, And This Was As True In Washington's Day As It Is Now, And Always Will Be.

Every Syllable That Can Be Struck Out Is Pure Profit, And Every Page That Can Be Economised Is A Five-per-cent Dividend. Nature Rebels Against This Rule; The Flesh Is Weak, And Shrinks From The Scissors; I Groan In Retrospect Over The Weak.

My Rule In Making Up Examination Questions Is To Ask Questions Which I Can't Myself Answer. It Astounds Me To See How Some Of My Students Answer Questions Which Would Play The Deuce With Me.

Questions And Answers

The Work Of Internal Government Has Become The Task Of Controlling The Thousands Of Fifth-rate Men.

We Shall Some Day Catch An Abstract Truth By The Tail, And Then We Shall Have Our Religion And Our Immortality.

The Habit Of Expression Leads To The Search For Something To Express. Something Remains As A Residuum Of The Commonplace Itself, If One Strikes Out Every Commonplace In The Expression.

The Historian Must Not Try To Know What Is Truth, If He Values His Honesty; For If He Cares For His Truths, He Is Certain To Falsify His Facts.

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.

As History Stands, It Is A Sort Of Chinese Play, Without End And Without Lesson.

The Proof That A Philosopher Does Not Know What He Is Talking About Is Apt To Sadden His Followers Before It Reacts On Himself.

The Study Of History Is Useful To The Historian By Teaching Him His Ignorance Of Women.

Since [rousseau's] Time, And Largely Thanks To Him, The Ego Has Steadily Tended To Efface Itself, And, For Purposes Of Model, To Become A Manikin On Which The Toilet Of Education Is To Be Draped In Order To Show The Fit Or Misfit Of The Clothes. The Object Of Study Is The Garment, Not The Figure.

Chaos Breeds Life; Order Creates Habit.

The President May Indeed In One Respect Resemble The Commander Of An Army In Peace, But In Another And More Essential Sense He Resembles The Commander Of A Ship At Sea. He Must Have A Helm To Grasp, A Course To Steer, A Port To Seek. He Must Sooner Or Later Be Convinced That A Perpetual Calm Is As Little To His Purpose As A Perpetual Hurricane, And That Without Headway The Ship Can Arrive Nowhere.

Boys Naturally Look On All Force As An Enemy.

A New Friend Is Always A Miracle, But At Thirty-three Years Old, Such A Bird Of Paradise Rising In The Sage-brush Was An Avatar. One Friend In A Lifetime Is Much; Two Are Many; Three Are Hardly

No Man, However Strong, Can Serve Ten Years As Schoolmaster, Priest, Or Senator, And Remain Fit For Anything Else.

There Are Two Things That Seem To Be At The Bottom Of Our Constitutions; One Is A Continual Tendency Towards Politics; The Other Is Family Pride; And It Is Strange How These Two Feelings Run Through All Of Us.

The Spring Is Here, Young And Beautiful As Ever, And Absolutely Shocking In Its Display Of Reckless Maternity; But The Judas Treewill Bloom For You On The Bosphorus If You Get There In Time. No One Ever Loved The Dog-wood And Judas Tree As I Have Done, And It Is My One Crown Of Life To Be Sure That I Am Going To Take Them With Me To Heaven To Enjoy Real Happiness With The Virgin And Them.

By Nature, Man Is Lazy, Working Only Under Compulsion; And When He Is Strong We Will Always Live, As Far As He Can, Upon The Labor Or The Property Of The Weak.

An Artist's Business Is Only To See.

Man Had In The Beginning No Power Of Analysis Or Synthesis Approaching That Of The Spider, Or Even Of The Honey-bee; He Had Acute Sensibility To The Higher Forces. Fire Taught Him Secrets That No Other Animal Could Learn; Running Water Probably Taught Him Even More, Especially In His First Lessons Of Mechanics; The Animals Helped To Educate Him, Trusting Themselves Into His Hands Merely For The Sake Of Their Food, And Carrying His Burdens Or Supplying His Clothing; The Grasses And Grains Were Academies Of Study.

Good Men Do The Most Harm.

American Society Is A Sort Of Flat, Fresh-water Pond Which Absorbs Silently, Without Reaction, Anything Which Is Thrown Into It.

As History Stands, It Is A Sort Of Chinese Play, Without End Andl Without Lesson. With These Impressions I Wrote The Last Line Of My History, Asking For A Round Century Before Going Further.

No Man Likes To Have His Intelligence Or Good Faith Questioned, Especially If He Has Doubts About It Himself.

History Is The Most Aristocratic Of All Literary Pursuits, Because It Obliges The Historian To Be Rich As Well As Educated.

Against Them Make Ready Your Strength To The Utmost Of Your Power, Including Steeds Of War, To Strike Terror Into (the Hearts Of) The Enemies, Of Allah And Your Enemies, And Others Besides, Whom Ye May Not Know, But Whom Allah Doth Know

Unity Is Vision; It Must Have Been Part Of The Process Of Learning To See.

It Is Always Good Men Who Do The Most Harm In The World.

The Spider-mind Acquires A Faculty Of Memory, And, With It, A Singular Skill Of Analysis And Synthesis, Taking Apart And Putting Together In Different Relations The Meshes Of Its Trap. Man Had In The Beginning No Power Of Analysis Or Synthesis Approaching That Of The Spider, Or Even Of The Honey-bee; But He Had Acute Sensibility To The Higher Forces.

We Combat Obstacles In Order To Get Repose, And When Got, The Repose Is Insupportable.

Nothing In Education Is So Astonishing As The Amount Of Ignorance It Accumulates In The Form Of Inert Facts.

The Mind Resorts To Reason For Want Of Training.

An American Virgin Would Never Dare Command; An American Venus Would Never Dare Exist.

The Progress Of Evolution From President Washington To President Grant Was Alone Evidence To Upset Darwin.

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.

If Thought Is Capable Of Being Classed With Electricity, Or Will With Chemical Affinity, As A Mode Of Motion, It Seems Necessary To Fall At Once Under The Second Law Of Thermodynamics As One Of The Energies Which Most Easily Degrades Itself, And, If Not Carefully Guarded, Returns Bodily To The Cheaper Form Called Heat. Of All Possible Theories, This Is Likely To Prove The Most Fatal To Professors Of History.

Power Is Poison. Its Effect On Presidents Had Always Been Tragic, Chiefly As An Almost Insane Excitement At First, And A Worse Reaction Afterwards.

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.

If One Shed Tears, They Must Be Shed On One's Pillow.

The Woman Who Is Known Only Through A Man Is Known Wrong.

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.

Simplicity Is The Most Deceitful Mistress That Ever Betrayed Man.

He Never Labored So Hard To Learn A Language As He Did To Hold His Tongue, And It Affected Him For Life. The Habit Of Reticence — Of Talking Without Meaning — Is Never Effaced.

A Certain Secret Jealousy Of The British Minister Is Always Lurking In The Breast Of Every American Senator, If He Is Truly Democratic; For Democracy, Rightly Understood, Is The Government Of The People, By The People, For The Benefit Of Senators, And There Is Always A Danger That The British Minister May Not Understand This Political Principle As He Should.

One Sought Not Absolute Truth. One Sought Only A Spool On Which To Wind The Thread Of History Without Breaking It.

The Scientific Mind Is Atrophied, And Suffers Under Inherited Cerebral Weakness, When It Comes In Contact With The Eternal Woman--astarte, Isis, Demeter, Aphrodite, And The Last And Greatest Deity Of All, The Virgin.

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.

I Am Fairly Tired--bored Beyond Endurance--by The World We Live In, And Its Ideals, And Am Ready To Say So, Not Violently, But Kindly, As One Rubs Salt Into The Back Of A Flogged Sailor As Though One Loved Him.

In The History Of The United States, There Is No Continuity At All. You Can Cut Through It Anywhere And Nothing On This Side Of The Cut Has Anything To Do With Anything On The Other Side.

Trending Author

E. F. Schumacher

Category