"The progress of evolution from President Washington to President Grant was alone evidence to upset Darwin."

Loneliness

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Insight & Reflection

This reflection on loneliness by Henry Adams resonates across generations. It highlights a fundamental truth about human nature: our continuous search for meaning in loneliness is what ultimately defines our character and our path forward.

About Henry Adams

Henry Brooks Adams was an American historian and a member of the Adams political family, descended from two U.S. presidents. As a young Harvard graduate, he served as secretary to his father, Charles Francis Adams, Abraham Lincoln's minister (ambassador) to the United Kingdom. The posting influenced the younger man through the experience of wartime diplomacy and absorption in English culture, especially the works of John Stuart Mill. After the American Civil War, he became a political journalist who entertained America's foremost intellectuals at his homes in Washington and Boston.

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Editorial Note: This quote is curated and fact-checked by the ShortQuote Editorial Team. Verified Literature Specialist.

More by Henry Adams

"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."

— Henry Adams
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"Chaos was the law of nature Order was the dream of man."

— Henry Adams
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"American society is a sort of flat, fresh-water pond which absorbs silently, without reaction, anything which is thrown into it."

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

— Henry Adams
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More about Loneliness

"The desire to get married, which - I regret to say, I believe is basic and primal in women - is followed almost immediately by an equally basic and primal urge - which is to be single again."

— Nora Ephron
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"What is uttered from the heart alone, Will win the hearts of others to your own."

— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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"The strongest man in the world is he who stands most alone."

— Henrik Ibsen
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"This is the place where anybody - like an African American kid raised by a single mom - can be president."

— Jennifer M. Granholm
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