Extended excerpt [Autobiographical essay, Chapter XX, ‘Failure (1871)’ Note that in the 1800s, the word ‘faggot’ was a common term for a stick of wood.]:

“A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops. A teacher is expected to teach truth, and may perhaps flatter himself that he does so, if he stops with the alphabet or the multiplication table, as a mother teaches truth by making her child eat with a spoon; but morals are quite another truth and philosophy is more complex still. A teacher must either treat history as a catalogue, a record, a romance, or as an evolution; and whether he affirms or denies evolution, he falls into all the burning faggots of the pit. He makes of his scholars either priests or atheists, plutocrats or socialists, judges or anarchists, almost in spite of himself.” (pp. 300-301)

Source link: The Education of Henry Adams (1918 Houghton Mifflin edition) online via Google Books: https://books.google.com/books?id=-ThaAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA300&dq=A+teacher+affects+eternity

Extended excerpt [Autobiographical essay, Chapter VI, ‘Rome (1859-1860)’]:

“All experience is an arch, to build upon. Yet Adams admitted himself unable to guess what use his second winter in Germany was to him, or what he expected it to be. Even the doctrine of accidental education broke down.” (p. 87)

Source link: The Education of Henry Adams (1918 Houghton Mifflin edition) online via Google Books: https://books.google.com/books?id=-ThaAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA87&dq=All+experience+is+an+arch+The+Education+of+Henry+Adams

Extended excerpt: [Letter] “Everyone is so damnably kind and forbearing, that there is absolutely no justification for discontent. 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. Enfin! we made it so.” (p. 514)

Source link: Letters of Henry Adams 1892-1918 (1932) online via Internet Archive: https://archive.org/stream/lettersofhenryad008807mbp#page/n531/mode/2up/search/bourgeois

Extended excerpt: [Autobiographical essay – Chapter XXXI, ‘The Grammar of Science (1903)’]

“The kinetic theory of gas is an assertion of ultimate chaos. In plain words, Chaos was the law of nature; Order was the dream of man.” (p. 451)

Source link: The Education of Henry Adams (1918 Houghton Mifflin edition) online via Google Books: https://books.google.com/books?id=-ThaAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA451&dq=In+plain+words,+Chaos+was+the+law+of+nature

Extended excerpt [Autobiography, written in the third person – Chapter XXI, ‘Twenty Years After (1892)’]:

“No doubt the world at large will always lag so far behind the active mind as to make a soft cushion of inertia to drop upon, as it did for Henry Adams; but 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.” (p. 314)

Source link: The Education of Henry Adams (1918 Houghton Mifflin edition) online via Google Books: https://books.google.com/books?id=-ThaAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA314&dq=education+should+try+to+lessen+the+obstacles,+diminish+the+friction

Extended excerpt [Autobiography, written in the third person – Chapter XII ‘Eccentricity (1863)’]:

“These questions of taste, of feeling, of inheritance, need no settlement. Every one carries his own inch-rule of taste, and amuses himself by applying it, triumphantly, wherever he travels. Whatever others thought, the cleverest Englishman held that national eccentricity needed correction, and were beginning to correct it.” (p. 182)

Source link: The Education of Henry Adams (1918 Houghton Mifflin edition) online via Google Books: https://books.google.com/books?id=-ThaAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA182&dq=Every+one+carries+his+own+inch-rule+of+taste

Extended excerpt [Autobiography, written in the third person – Chapter XX, ‘Failure (1871)’]:

“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 possible. Friendship needs a certain parallelism of life, a community of thought, a rivalry of aim.” (p. 312)

Source link: The Education of Henry Adams (1918 Houghton Mifflin edition) online via Google Books:: https://books.google.com/books?id=-ThaAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA312&dq=Friendship+needs+a+certain+parallelism+of+life

Extended excerpt [Autobiography, written in the third person – Chapter I ‘Quincy (1838-1848)’]:

“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. (p. 12)

Source link: The Education of Henry Adams (1918 Houghton Mifflin edition) online via Google Books:: https://books.google.com/books?id=-ThaAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA12&dq=has+always+been,+and+must+always+be,+the+task+of+education

Extended excerpt [Letter to Adams’ brother Charles Francis Adams, Jr.]:

“You may think all this nonsense, but I tell you these are great times. Man has mounted science, and is now run away with. 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. Some day science may have the existence of mankind in its power, and the human race commit suicide by blowing up the world.” (p. 135)

Source link: A Cycle of Adams Letters: 1861-1865 (1920) online via Google Books: https://books.google.com/books?id=qjxaAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA135&dq=I+firmly+believe+that+before+many+centuries+more 

Extended excerpt [Autobiography, written in the third person – Chapter XII, ‘Eccentricity (1863)’]:

“Knowledge of human nature is the beginning and end of political education, but several years of arduous study in the neighborhood of Westminster led Henry Adams to think that knowledge of English human nature had little or no value outside of England. In Paris, such a habit stood in one’s way; in America, it roused all the instincts of native jealousy.” (p. 180)

Source link: The Education of Henry Adams (1918 Houghton Mifflin edition) online via Google Books: https://books.google.com/books?id=-ThaAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA180&dq=Knowledge+of+human+nature+is+the+beginning

Extended excerpt [Autobiography, written in the third person – Chapter I, ‘Quincy (1838-1848)’]:

“Politics, as a practice, whatever its professions, has always been the systematic organization of hatreds, and Massachusetts politics had been as harsh as the climate.” (p. 7)

Source link: The Education of Henry Adams (1918 Houghton Mifflin edition) online via Google Books: https://books.google.com/books?id=-ThaAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA7&dq=Politics+as+a+practice+whatever+its+professions

Extended excerpt [Autobiography, written in the third person – Chapter XXX ‘Vis Inertiae (1903).’ Ellipsis – Repeat Right]:

“The dictionary said that inertia was a property of matter, by which matter tends, when at rest, to remain so, and, when in motion, to move on in a straight line. Finding that his mind refused to imagine itself at rest or in a straight line, he was forced, as usual, to let it imagine something else; and since the question concerned the mind, and not matter, he decided from personal experience that his mind was never at rest, but moved – when normal – about something it called a motive, and never moved without motives to move it.…This seemed simple as running water; but simplicity is the most deceitful mistress that ever betrayed man.” (p. 441)

Source link: The Education of Henry Adams (1918 Houghton Mifflin edition) online via Google Books: https://books.google.com/books?id=-ThaAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA441&dq=simplicity+is+the+most+deceitful+mistress

Extended excerpt: [Autobiography, written in the third person – Chapter X, ‘Political Morality (1862)’]

“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; a diseased appetite, like a passion for drink or perverted tastes; one can scarcely use expressions too strong to describe the violence of egotism it stimulates; and Thurlow Weed was one of the exceptions; a rare immune.” (p. 147)

Source link: The Education of Henry Adams (1918 Houghton Mifflin edition) online via Google Books: https://books.google.com/books?id=-ThaAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA147&dq=The+effect+of+power+and+publicity+on+all+men+is+the+aggravation+of+self,+a+sort+of+tumor+that+ends+by+killing+the+victim

Extended excerpt [Autobiography, written in the third person – Chapter XXIII, ‘Silence (1894-1898)’]:

“The woman who is known only through a man is known wrong, and excepting one or two like Mme. De Sevigne, no woman has pictured herself. The American woman of the nineteenth century will live only as the man saw her; probably she will be less known than the woman of the eighteenth; none of the female descendants of Abigail Adams can ever be nearly so familiar as her letters have made her; and all this is pure loss to history, for the American woman of the nineteenth century was much better company than the American man; she was probably much better company than her grandmothers. (p. 353)

Source link: The Education of Henry Adams (1918 Houghton Mifflin edition) online via Google Books: https://books.google.com/books?id=-ThaAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA353&dq=The+woman+who+is+known+only+through+a+man+is+known+wrong