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Frases de Henry Adams
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Henry Brooks Adams fue un hombre de letras e historiador estadounidense.

Siendo parte de la élite de Boston y descendiente de dos presidentes, fue educado con cierta aversión por la política norteamericana de su tiempo. De joven fue corresponsal y editor de un periódico, exigió reformas sociales y políticas, pero se vio desilusionado con un mundo que él describía como desprovisto de principios.

Esa pérdida de fe, fue reflejada en su novela Democracy: An American Novel . Su estudio sobre la democracia de Estados Unidos, culminó en su History of the United States of America de nueve tomos , la cual recibió elogios inmediatos.

En Monte Saint-Michel y Chartres , describió la concepción del mundo medieval manifiesta en su arquitectura. The Education of Henry Adams , es su obra más conocida y una de las autobiografías más sobresalientes de la literatura occidental, donde plasma sus conflictos con las incertidumbres del siglo XX.

✵ 16. febrero 1838 – 27. marzo 1918  •  Otros nombres Henry Brooks Adams, 亨利·亞當斯
Henry Adams Foto
Henry Adams: 318 citas3 Me gusta

Frases célebres de Henry Adams

“Un amigo en la vida es mucho. Dos son demasiado. Tres son imposibles.”

Henry Adams

Fuente: Moya Cabrera, Javier. La materia. Editorial Libros.com, 2016. ISBN 9788416616626.

“Un profesor trabaja para la eternidad: nunca puede decir dónde acaba su influencia.”

Henry Adams

Original: «A teacher affects eternity, he can never tell where his influence stops».
Fuente: Ortega Blake, Arturo. El gran libro de las frases célebres. Editorial Penguin Random House Grupo Editorial México, 2013 ISBN 978-60-7311-631-2.
Fuente: Egan, James. 3000 Astounding Quotes. Edición ilustrada. Editorial Lulu.com, 2015. ISBN 9781326400378. p. 38.

“Nada en la educación es tan sorprendente como la cantidad de ignorancia que acumula en forma de hechos inertes.”

Henry Adams

Original: «Nothing in education is so astonishing as the amount of ignorance it accumulates in the form of inert facts».

“La política práctica consiste en ignorar los hechos.”

Henry Adams

Original: «Practical politics consists in ignoring facts».

“Las palabras son resbaladizas.”

Henry Adams libro The Education of Henry Adams

Original: «Words are slipeery».
Fuente: The Oxford Dictionary of American Quotations. ISBN 9780195168235. p. 362.
Fuente: The Education of Henry Adams.

“Filosofía: respuesta ininteligible a problemas insolubles.”

Henry Adams

Original: «Philosophy: Unintelligible answer to insoluble problems».

“En cuanto a América, es el fruto ideal de todas tus esperanzas y reformas juveniles. Todos son bastante decentes, respetables, domésticos, burgueses, de clase media y aburridos. No hay absolutamente nada que repeler excepto que es un aburrimiento.”

Henry Adams

Original: «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 is a bore».

Henry Adams: Frases en inglés

“The Chartres apse is as entertaining as all the other Gothic apses together, because it overrides the architect. You may, if you really have no imagination whatever, reject the idea that the Virgin herself made the plan; the feebleness of our fancy is now congenital, organic, beyond stimulant or strychnine, and we shrink like sensitive plants from the touch of a vision or spirit; but at least one can still sometimes feel a woman's taste, and in the apse of Chartres one feels nothing else.”

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Henry Adams

Mont Saint Michel and Chartres (1904)

“Then came the journey up to London through Birmingham and the Black District, another lesson, which needed much more to be rightly felt. The plunge into darkness lurid with flames; the sense of unknown horror in this weird gloom which then existed nowhere else, and never had existed before, except in volcanic craters; the violent contrast between this dense, smoky, impenetrable darkness, and the soft green charm that one glided into, as one emerged — the revelation of an unknown society of the pit — made a boy uncomfortable, though he had no idea that Karl Marx was standing there waiting for him, and that sooner or later the process of education would have to deal with Karl Marx much more than with Professor Bowen of Harvard College or his Satanic free-trade majesty John Stuart Mill.”

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Henry Adams

The Black District was a practical education, but it was infinitely far in the distance. The boy ran away from it, as he ran away from everything he disliked.
The Education of Henry Adams (1907)

“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. As far as Adams could teach experience, he was bound to warn them that he had found it an invariable disaster. Power is poison. Its effect on Presidents had been always tragic, chiefly as an almost insane excitement at first, and a worse reaction afterwards.”

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Henry Adams

The Education of Henry Adams (1907)

“Friends are born, not made, and Henry never mistook a friend except when in power. From the first slight meeting in February and March, 1861, he recognized Hay as a friend, and never lost sight of him at the future crossing of their paths.”

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Henry Adams

The Education of Henry Adams (1907)

“All experience is an arch, to build upon.”

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Henry Adams

The Education of Henry Adams (1907)

“Religion is, or ought to be, a feeling.”

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Henry Adams

Mont Saint Michel and Chartres (1904)

“That it was actual and serious in France as in the Senate Chamber at Washington, proved itself at once by forcing Adams to buy an automobile, which was a supreme demonstration because this was the form of force which Adams most abominated. He had set aside the summer for study of the Virgin, not as a sentiment but as a motive power, which had left monuments widely scattered and not easily reached. The automobile alone could unite them in any reasonable sequence, and although the force of the automobile, for the purposes of a commercial traveller, seemed to have no relation whatever to the force that inspired a Gothic cathedral, the Virgin in the twelfth century would have guided and controlled both bag-man and architect, as she controlled the seeker of history.”

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Henry Adams

The Education of Henry Adams (1907)

“Nothing in education is so astonishing as the amount of ignorance it accumulates in the form of inert facts.”

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Henry Adams

The Education of Henry Adams (1907)

“No doubt, too, that even his restless-minded, introspective, self-conscious children who knew him best were much too ignorant of the world and of human nature to suspect how rare and complete was the model before their eyes.”

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Henry Adams

The Education of Henry Adams (1907)

“He took their facts for granted. He knew no more than a firefly about rays — or about race or sex — or ennui — or a bar of music — or a pang of love — or a grain of musk — or of phosphorus — or conscience — or duty — or the force of Euclidian geometry — or non-Euclidian — or heat — or light — or osmosis — or electrolysis — or the magnet — or ether — or vis inertiae — or gravitation — or cohesion — or elasticity — or surface tension — or capillary attraction — or Brownian motion — or of some scores, or thousands, or millions of chemical attractions, repulsions or indifferences which were busy within and without him; or, in brief, of Force itself, which, he was credibly informed, bore some dozen definitions in the textbooks, mostly contradictory, and all, as he was assured, beyond his intelligence.”

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Henry Adams

The Education of Henry Adams (1907)

“Still another nightmare he suffered at a dance given by the old Duchess Dowager of Somerset, a terrible vision in castanets, who seized him and forced him to perform a Highland fling before the assembled nobility and gentry, with the daughter of the Turkish Ambassador for partner. This might seem humorous to some, but to him the world turned to ashes.”

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Henry Adams

The Education of Henry Adams (1907)

“In essence, religion was love; in no case was it logic. Reason can reach nothing except through the senses; God, by essence, cannot be reached through the senses; if he is to be known at all, he must be known by contact of spirit with spirit, essence with essence; directly; by emotion; by ecstasy; by absorption of our existence with his; by substitution of his spirit for ours. The world had no need to wait five hundred years longer in order to hear this same result reaffirmed by Pascal. Saint Francis of Assisi had affirmed it loudly enough, even if the voice of Saint Bernard had been less powerful than it was. The Virgin had asserted it in tones more gentle, but anyone can still see how convincing, who stops a moment to feel the emotion that lifted her wonderful Chartres spire up to God.”

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Henry Adams

Mont Saint Michel and Chartres (1904)

“The artists and donors and priests forgot nothing which, in their judgment could set off the authority, elegance and refinement of the Queen of Heaven; even the young ladies-in-waiting are there, figured by the twelve Virtues and the fourteen Beatitudes; and indeed, though men are plenty and some of them are handsome, women give the tone, the charm, and mostly the intelligence. The court of Mary is feminine, and its charms are Grace and Love; perhaps even more grace than love, in a social sense, if you look at Beauty and Friendship among Beatitudes.”

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Henry Adams

Mont Saint Michel and Chartres (1904)

“In the center sits Mary, with her crown on her head and her son in her lap, enthroned, receiving the homage of heaven and earth; of all time, ancient and modern; of all thought, Christian and Pagan; of all men, and all women; including if you please, your homage and mine, which she receives without question, as her due; which she cannot be said to claim, because she is above making claims; she is empress. Her left hand bore a sceptre; her right supported the child, who looks directly forward, repeating the mother's attitude, and raises his right hand to bless, while his left rests on the orb of empire. She and her child are one.”

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Henry Adams

Mont Saint Michel and Chartres (1904)

“Shakespeare realised the thirteenth-century woman more vividly than the thirteenth-century poets ever did; but that is no new thing to say of Shakespeare.”

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Henry Adams

Mont Saint Michel and Chartres (1904)

“One sees instantly that neither Francis of Assisi nor Bacon of Verulam could have hoped for peace with the Schools; twelfth-century ecstasy felt the futility of mere rhetoric quite as keenly as seventeenth-century scepticism was to feel it.”

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Henry Adams

Mont Saint Michel and Chartres (1904)

“As a type for study, or a standard for education, Lodge was the more interesting of the two. Roosevelts are born and never can be taught; but Lodge was a creature of teaching — Boston incarnate — the child of his local parentage; and while his ambition led him to be more, the intent, though virtuous, was — as Adams admitted in his own case — restless. An excellent talker, a voracious reader, a ready wit, an accomplished orator, with a clear mind and a powerful memory, he could never feel perfectly at ease whatever leg he stood on, but shifted, sometimes with painful strain of temper, from one sensitive muscle to another, uncertain whether to pose as an uncompromising Yankee; or a pure American; or a patriot in the still purer atmosphere of Irish, Germans, or Jews; or a scholar and historian of Harvard College. English to the last fibre of his thought — saturated with English literature, English tradition, English taste — revolted by every vice and by most virtues of Frenchmen and Germans, or any other Continental standards, but at home and happy among the vices and extravagances of Shakespeare — standing first on the social, then on the political foot; now worshipping, now banning; shocked by the wanton display of immorality, but practicing the license of political usage; sometimes bitter, often genial, always intelligent — Lodge had the singular merit of interesting. The usual statesmen flocked in swarms like crows, black and monotonous. Lodge's plumage was varied, and, like his flight, harked back to race. He betrayed the consciousness that he and his people had a past, if they dared but avow it, and might have a future, if they could but divine it.”

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Henry Adams

The Education of Henry Adams (1907)

“…if Harvard College thought Henry Adams worth employing at four dollars a day, why should Washington decline his services when he asked nothing? Why should he be dragged from a career he liked in a place he loved, into a career he detested, in a place and climate he shunned?”

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Henry Adams

The Education of Henry Adams (1907)

“I turn green in bed at midnight if I think of the horror of a year's warfare in the Philippines … We must slaughter a million or two foolish Malays in order to give them the comforts of flannel petticoats and electric railways.”

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Henry Adams

Letter to Elizabeth Cameron (22 January 1899), in J. C. Levinson et al. eds., The Letters of Henry Adams, Volume IV: 1892–1899 (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1988), p. 670

“Wharton was captivated by her sweet face, and tried to make her understand his theory that the merit of a painting was not so much in what it explained as in what it suggested.”

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Henry Adams

Referring to Catherine Brooke, Ch. III
Esther: A Novel (1884)

“Monckton Milnes was a social power in London, and of course he himself affected social eccentricity, challenging ridicule with the indifference of one who knew himself to be the first wit in London, and a maker of men — of a great many men. A word from him went far. An invitation to his breakfast-table went farther. Behind his almost Falstaffian mask and laugh of Silenus, he carried a fine, broad, and high intelligence which no one questioned. As a young man he had written verses, which some readers thought poetry, and which were certainly not altogether prose. Later, in Parliament he made speeches, chiefly criticised as too good for the place and too high for the audience. Socially, he was one of two or three men who went everywhere, knew everybody, talked of everything.”

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Henry Adams

The Education of Henry Adams (1907)

“Courteous love was avowedly a form of drama, but not the less a force of society. Illusion for illusion, courteous love in Thibaut's hands, or in the hands of Dante and Petrarch, was as substantial as any other convention;— the balance of trade, the rights of man, the Athanasian Creed. In that sense the illusions alone were real; if the middle-ages had reflected only what was practical, nothing would have survived for us.”

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Henry Adams

Mont Saint Michel and Chartres (1904)

“The Woman had once been supreme; in France she still seemed potent, not merely as sentiment but as a force; why was she unknown in America?”

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Henry Adams

The Education of Henry Adams (1907)

“Harvard College was a negative force, and negative forces have value. Slowly it weakened the violent political bias of childhood, not by putting interests in its place, but by mental habits which had no bias at all.”

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Henry Adams

The Education of Henry Adams (1907)

“…analogies […] are figures intended to serve as fatal weapons if they succeed, and as innocent toys if they fail.”

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Henry Adams

Mont Saint Michel and Chartres (1904)

“The children reached manhood without knowing religion, and with the certainty that dogma, metaphysics, and abstract philosophy were not worth knowing. So one-sided an education could have been possible in no other country or time, but it became, almost of necessity, the more literary and political. As the children grew up, they exaggerated the literary and the political interests. They joined in the dinner-table discussions and from childhood the boys were accustomed to hear, almost every day, table-talk as good as they were ever likely to hear again. The eldest child, Louisa, was one of the most sparkling creatures her brother met in a long and varied experience of bright women.”

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Henry Adams

The Education of Henry Adams (1907)

“The force of the Virgin was still felt at Lourdes, and seemed to be as potent as X-rays, but in America neither Venus nor Virgin ever had value as force — at most as sentiment.”

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Henry Adams

The Education of Henry Adams (1907)

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