Henri Frederic Amiel Quotes

Let mystery have its place in you ; do not be always turning up your whole soil with the ploughshare of self-examination, but leave a little fallow corner in your heart ready for any seed the winds may bring.

A woman is sometimes fugitive, irrational, indeterminable, illogical and contradictory. A great deal of forbearance ought to be shown her, and a good deal of prudence exercised with regard to her, for she may bring about innumerable evils without knowing it. Capable of all kinds of devotion, and of all kinds of treason, monster incomprehensible, raised to the second power, she is at once the delight and the terror of man.

True love is that which ennobles the personality, fortifies the heart, and sanctifies the existence.

Action is coarsened thought; thought becomes concrete, obscure, and unconscious.

Sadness takes up the pen more readily than joy.

He who floats with the current, who does not guide himself according to higher principles, who has no ideal, no convictions-such a man is . . . a thing moved, instead of a living and moving being-an echo, not a voice. The man who has no inner-life is a slave of his surroundings as the barometer is the obedient servant of the air.

Civilization is first of all a moral thing. Without truth, respect for duty, love of neighbor, and virtue, everything is destroyed. The morality of a society is alone the basis of civilization.

Obstinacy is will asserting itself without being able to justify itself. It is persistence without a reasonable motive. It is the tenacity of self-love substituted for that of reason and conscience.

Society lives by faith, and develops by science.

Truth is not only violated by falsehood; it may be equally outraged by silence.

As it is impossible to be outside God, the best is consciously to dwell in Him.

Sympathy is the first condition of criticism; reason and justice presuppose, at their origin, emotion.

Order is a great person's need and their true well being.

We are always making God our accomplice, that so we may legalize our own iniquities. Every successful massacre is consecrated by a Te Deum, and the clergy have never been wanting in benedictions for any victorious enormity.

Dreams are excursions into the limbo of things, a semi-deliverance from the human prison.

Life is an apprenticeship to the constant renunciations, to the steady failure of our claims, our hopes, our powers, our liberty.

Nothing resembles pride so much as discouragement.

Every living being seeks instinctively to complete itself.

What governs men is the fear of truth.

Emancipation from error is the condition of real knowledge.

You desire to know the art of living, my friend? It is contained in one phrase: make use of suffering.

Wisdom consists in rising superior both to madness and to common sense, and is lending oneself to the universal illusion without becoming its dupe.

Uncertainty is the refuge of hope.

Sacrifice still exists everywhere, and everywhere the elect of each generation suffers for the salvation of the rest.

One may guess the why and wherefore of a tear and yet find it too subtle to give any account of. A tear may be the poetical resume of so many simultaneous impressions, the quintessence of so many opposing thoughts! It is like a drop of one of those precious elixirs of the East which contain the life of twenty plants fused into a single aroma.

The man who has no inner-life is a slave to his surroundings.

How true it is that our destinies are decided by nothings and that a small imprudence helped by some insignificant accident, as an acorn is fertilized by a drop of rain, may raise the trees on which perhaps we and others shall be crucified.

Whatever impatience we may feel towards our neighbor, and whatever indignation our race may rouse in us, we are chained one to another, and, companions in labour and misfortune, have everything to lose by mutual recrimination and reproach. Let us be silent as to each other's weakness, helpful, tolerant, many, tender towards each other! Or, if we cannot feel tenderness, may we at least feel pity!

It is dangerous to abandon one's self to the luxury of grief; it deprives one of courage, and even of the wish for recovery.

Happiness does away with ugliness, and even makes the beauty of beauty.

Cleverness is serviceable for everything, sufficient for nothing.

Criticism is above all a gift, an intuition, a matter of tact and flair; it cannot be taught or demonstrated--it is an art. Critical genius means an aptitude for discerning truth under appearances or in disguises which conceal it; for discovering it in spite of the errors of testimony, the frauds of tradition, the dust of time, the loss or alteration of texts. It is the sagacity of the hunter whom nothing deceives for long, and whom no ruse can throw off the trail.

Love is like swallowing hot chocolate before it has cooled off. It takes you by surprise at first, but keeps you warm for a long time.

The spirit of sarcasm lives and thrives in the midst of universal wreck; its balls are enchanted and itself invulnerable, and it braves retaliations and reprisals because itself is a mere flash, a bodiless and magical nothing.

Faith is certitude without proofs ... Faith is a sentiment, for it is a hope; it is an instinct, for it precedes all outward instruction.

The masses are the material of democracy, but its form-that is to say, the laws which express the general reason, justice, and utility-can only be rightly shaped by wisdom, which is by no means a universal property.

War is a brutal and fierce means of pacification; it means the suppression of resistance by the destruction or enslavement of the conquered.

A microscopic phantom of the universe; this is all that we are able to be.

I'm not interested in age. People who tell me their age are silly. You're as old as you feel.

To know where one is going and what one wishes - this is order ... to organize one's life to distribute one's time ... all this belong to and is included in the word order.

The ideal doctor would be a man endowed with profound knowledge of life and of the soul, intuitively divining any suffering or disorder of whatever kind, and restoring peace by his mere presence.

The history of man is essentially zoological; it becomes human late in the day, and then only in the beautiful souls, the souls alive to justice, goodness, enthusiasm, and devotion. The angel shows itself rarely and with difficulty through the highly-organized brute.

It is work which gives flavor to life.

We become actors without realizing it, and actors without wanting to.

The stationary condition is the beginning of the end

Our duty is to be useful, not according to our desires but according to our powers.

A man must be able to cut a knot, for everything cannot be untied; he must know how to disengage what is essential from the detail in which it is enwrapped, for everything cannot be equally considered; in a word, he must be able to simplify his duties, his business and his life.

Life alone can rekindle life.