"The pathetic interest of the drama deepens with every new expression, but at least you can learn from it that your parents in the nineteenth century were not to blame for losing the sense of unity in art. As early as the fourteenth century, signs of unsteadiness appeared, and, before the eighteenth century, unity became only a reminiscence. The old habit of centralising a strain at one point, and then dividing and subdividing it, and distributing it on visible lines of support to a visible foundation, disappeared in architecture soon after 1500, but lingered in theology two centuries longer, and even, in very old-fashioned communities, far down to our own time; but its values were forgotten, and it survived chiefly as a stock jest against the clergy. The passage between the two epochs is as beautiful as the Slave of Michael Angelo; but, to feel its beauty, you should see it from above, as it came from its radiant source. Truth, indeed, may not exist; science avers it to be only a relation; but what men took for truth stares one everywhere in the eye and begs for sympathy."
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
Academics from the United StatesEducators from the United StatesHistorians from the United StatesAutobiographers from the United StatesJournalists from Boston
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Sources
Imported from EN Wikiquote
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Henry_Adams
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
Henry Adams
1838 – 1918
US-amerikanischer Historiker
310 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by Henry Adams →
Related Quotes
"It was surely no fault of his that the universe seemed to him real; perhaps — as Mr. Emerson justly said — it was so."
"Adams was content to read Darwin, especially his "Origin of Species" and his "Voyage of the Beagle." He was a Darwini…"
"One friend in a lifetime is much; two are many; three are hardly possible. Friendship needs a certain parallelism of …"
"A period of about twelve years measured the beat of the pendulum. After the Declaration of Independence, twelve years…"
"I disagree with my brother Charles and Theodore Roosevelt. I think that Lee should have been hanged. It was all the w…"
"Man has mounted science, and is now run away with. I firmly believe that before many centuries more, science will be …"
"I turn green in bed at midnight if I think of the horror of a year's warfare in the Philippines ... We must slaughter…"
"We never despised the world or its opinions, we only failed to find out its existence. The world, if it exists, feels…"
"For reasons which many persons thought ridiculous, Mrs. Lightfoot Lee decided to pass the winter in Washington. She w…"
"Who, then, is right? How can we all be right? Half of our wise men declare that the world is going straight to perdit…"