“If she belongs to any besides the present, it is to the next world which artists want to see, when paganism will come again and we can give a divinity to every waterfall.”
Henry Brooks Adams
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Religion
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“The preacher then went on to criticise the attitude of religion towards science. “If there is still a feeling of hostility between them … it is no longer the fault of religion. There have been times when the church seemed afraid, but she is so 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!”
Henry Brooks Adams
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Religion
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“The form of act or thought mattered nothing. 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 to-day, were all emanation 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 Brooks Adams
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Religion
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“To me it seems a shocking idea. I despise and loathe myself, and yet you thrust self at me from every corner of the church as though I loved and admired it. All religion does nothing but pursue me with self even into the next world.”
Henry Brooks Adams
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Religion
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“The only human beings I have thoroughly admired and respected in the world have been those who carried the load of the world with a smile, and who, in the face of anxieties that would have knocked me clean out, never showed a tremor. Such men and women end by owning us, soul and body, and our allegiance can never be shaken. We are only too glad to be owned. Religion is nothing but this.”
Henry Brooks Adams
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Religion
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“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. The planet itself seemed less impressive, in its old-fashioned, deliberate, annual or daily revolution, than this huge wheel, revolving within arm’s-length at some vertiginous speed, and barely murmuring,–scarcely humming an audible warning to stand a hair’s-breadth further for respect of power,–while it would not wake the baby lying close against its frame.”
Henry Brooks Adams
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Religion
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“The Woman had once been supreme; in France she still seemed potent, not merely as a sentiment but as a force; why was she unknown in 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.”
Henry Brooks Adams
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Sex
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“Positively I sit here, and look at Europe sink, first one deck disappearing, then another, and the whole ship slowly plunging bow-down into the abyss; until the nightmare gets to be howling. The Roman Empire was a trifle to it.”
Henry Brooks Adams
Submitted by Quonation |Category: History
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“Dates are stupidly annoying–what we want is not dates but taste;Myet we are uncomfortable without them.”
Henry Brooks Adams
Submitted by Quonation |Category: History
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“Supposing the Mechanical Phase to have lasted 300 years, from 1600 to 1900, the next or Electric Phase would have a life equal to (the square root of 300), or about seventeen years and a half, when–that is, in 1917Mit would pass into another or Ethereal Phase, which, for half a century, science has been promising, and which would last only (the square root of 17.5), or about four years, and bring Thought to the limit of its possibilities in the year 1921. It may well be!”
Henry Brooks Adams
Submitted by Quonation |Category: History
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“Measured by any standard known to science–by horse-power, calories, volts, mass in any shape,–the tension and vibration and volume and so-called progression of society were full a thousand times greater in 1900 than in 1800;Mthe force had doubled ten times over, and the speed, when measured by electrical standards as in telegraphy, approached infinity, and had annihilated both space and time. No law of material movement applied to it.”
Henry Brooks Adams
Submitted by Quonation |Category: History
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“The great word Evolution had not yet, in 1860, made a new religion of history, but the old religion had preached the same doctrine for a thousand years without finding in the entire history of Rome anything but flat contradiction.”
Henry Brooks Adams
Submitted by Quonation |Category: History
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“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.”
Henry Brooks Adams
Submitted by Quonation |Category: History
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“As History stands, it is a sort of Chinese Play, without end and without lesson.”
Henry Brooks Adams
Submitted by Quonation |Category: History
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“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.”
Henry Brooks Adams
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Education
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“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.”
Henry Brooks Adams
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Education
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“Nothing in education is so astonishing as the amount of ignorance it accumulates in the form of inert facts.”
Henry Brooks Adams
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Education
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“At the utmost, the active-minded young man should ask of his teacher only mastery of his tools. The young man himself, the subjectof 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.”
Henry Brooks Adams
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Education
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“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.”
Henry Brooks Adams
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Science
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“You are bothered, I suppose, by the idea that you can’t possibly believe in miracles and mysteries, and therefore can’t make a good wife for Hazard. You might just as well make yourself unhappy by doubting whether you would make a good wife to me because you can’t believe the first axiom in Euclid. There is no science which does not begin by requiring you to believe the incredible.”
Henry Brooks Adams
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Science
