Henry Adams Quotes

You have not yet learned that in this life you have to be like everyone else: the perfect mediocrity--no better, no worse. Individuality is a monster and it must be strangled in its cradle to make our friends feel comfortable.

As love, if love be perfect, casts out fear, so hate, if hate be perfect, casts out fear.

Just as we are often moved to merriment for no other reason than that the occasion calls for seriousness, so we are correspondingly serious when invited too freely to be amused.

God made thee perfect, not immutable.

In their choice of lovers both the male and the female reveal their essential nature. The type of human being we prefer reveals the contours of our heart. Love is an impulse which springs from the most profound depths of our beings, and upon reaching the visible surface of life carries with it an alluvium of shells and seaweed from the inner abyss. A skilled naturalist, by filing these materials, can reconstruct the oceanic depths from which they have been uprooted.

Our flaws are what make us perfect.

The only way to stave off boredom, in a complex domesticated primate like humankind, is to increase one's intelligence. This is not appealing to the average primate, who instead invents emotional games (soap opera and grand opera dramatics).

Love is man's natural endowment, but he doesn't know how to use it. He refuses to recognize the power of love because of his love of power.

I had a perfect life in my reach once, and it was a crashing bore. Perfect is too clean, too easy. I don't want perfect any more than I want to be perfect. I want imperfect.

Where else could one find such a perfect combination of American values -- racism, militarism, capitalism -- all packaged in one 'ideal' symbol, a woman.

The question of whether world peace will ever be possible can only be answered by someone familiar with world history. To be familiar with world history means, however, to know human beings as they have been and always will be. There is a vast difference, which most people will never comprehend, between viewing future history as it will be and viewing it as one might like it to be. Peace is a desire, war is a fact; and history has never paid heed to human desires and ideals.

A perfect faith is nowhere to be found, so it follows that all of us are partly unbelievers.

Nobody wants to watch perfect people.

Love is sweet, dearest Ned, but it cannot change a man's nature. -- Lyanna

He was too perfect, despite being one of the most imperfect people I knew.

We have perfected our weapons but failed to perfect the men who use them.

Imagine your ideal future. Visualize yourself as if your life were perfect in every respect.

Everyone has failed, everyone has misspoken, everyone has meant well but done the wrong thing. Your favorite restaurants, cafes and books have all gotten a one-star review along the way. No brand is perfect, no individual can pretend to be either. Perfect can't possibly be the goal, we're left with generous, important and human instead.

A man as he ought to be: that sounds to us as insipid as "a tree as it ought to be.

We forget, we have a short memory and we're human. This morning my Scripture was Isaiah 26:3, which said, Thou wilt keep him in perfect peace whose mind is stayed on Thee for he trusteth in Thee.

The fact is that the average man's love of liberty is nine-tenths imaginary, exactly like his love of sense, justice and truth.

Love becomes the ultimate answer to the ultimate human question.

Sexual love is a troubled and problematic relationship in cultures where there is a strong sense of man's separation from nature, especially when the realm of nature is felt to be inferior or contaminated with evil.

To escape boredom, man works either beyond what his usual needs require, or else he invents play, that is, work that is designed to quiet no need other than that for working in general.

I learn several great truths; as that it is impossible to see into the ways of futurity, that punishment always attends the villain, that love is the fond soother of the human breast.