Henry Adams

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

All experience is an arch, to build upon.

Chaos often breeds life, when order breeds habit.

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.

Some day science may have the existence of mankind in power, and the human race can commit suicide by blowing up the world.

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.

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

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

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.

No man, however strong, can serve ten years as schoolmaster, priest, or Senator, and remain fit for anything else.

Accident counts for as much in companionship as in marriage.

One friend in a lifetime is much, two are many, three are hardly possible. Friendship needs a certain parallelism of life, a community of thought, a rivalry of aim.