Top 100 Henri Frederic Amiel Quotes
#2. A modest garden contains, for those who know how to look and to wait, more instruction than a library.
Henri Frederic Amiel
#3. There are 2 sorts of pride: one in which we approve others, the other in which we cannot accept ourselves.
Henri Frederic Amiel
#5. Before giving advice we must have secured its acceptance, or, rather, have made it desired.
Henri Frederic Amiel
#6. Every situation is an equilibrium of forces; every life is a struggle between opposing forces working within the limits of a certain equilibrium
Henri Frederic Amiel
#7. The tragic solemnity of existence strikes us with terrible force on that morning when we wake to find the mournful words "too late" ringing in our ears.
Henri Frederic Amiel
#8. The test of every religious, political, or educational system is the men which it forms
Henri Frederic Amiel
#9. Destiny has two ways of crushing us - by refusing our wishes and by fulfilling them.
Henri Frederic Amiel
#11. Woman is the salvation or the destruction of the family. She carries its destiny in the folds of her mantle.
Henri Frederic Amiel
#12. Our systems, perhaps, are nothing more than an unconscious apology for our faults, a gigantic scaffolding whose object is to hide from us our favorite sin.
Henri Frederic Amiel
#13. It is not what he has, nor even what he does, which directly expresses the worth of a man, but what he is.
Henri Frederic Amiel
#14. 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.
Henri Frederic Amiel
#15. Tears are the symbol of the inability of the soul to restrain its emotion and retain its self command.
Henri Frederic Amiel
#16. Dare to be what you are, and learn to resign with a good grace all that you are not and to believe in your own individuality.
Henri Frederic Amiel
#18. For purposes of action nothing is more useful than narrowness of thought combined with energy of will.
Henri Frederic Amiel
#20. If ignorance and passion are the foes of popular morality, it must be confessed that moral indifference is the malady of the cultivated classes.
Henri Frederic Amiel
#21. The germs of all things are in every heart, and the greatest criminals as well as the greatest heroes are but different modes of ourselves.
Henri Frederic Amiel
#23. 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.
Henri Frederic Amiel
#25. Great men are true men, the men in whom nature has succeeded. They are not extraordinary - they are in the true order. It is the other species of men who are not what they ought to be.
Henri Frederic Amiel
#26. Our duty is to be useful, not according to our desires but according to our powers.
Henri Frederic Amiel
#27. We are always making God our accomplice so that we may legalize our own inequities.
Henri Frederic Amiel
#28. 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.
Henri Frederic Amiel
#29. In every loving woman there is a priestess of the past - a pious guardian of some affection, of which the object has disappeared.
Henri Frederic Amiel
#30. Time is but the space between our memories; as soon as we cease to perceive this space, time has disappeared.
Henri Frederic Amiel
#31. To live we must conquer incessantly, we must have the courage to be happy.
Henri Frederic Amiel
#32. Life is an apprenticeship to the constant renunciations, to the steady failure of our claims, our hopes, our powers, our liberty.
Henri Frederic Amiel
#34. Man is a passion which brings a will into play, which works an intelligence.
Henri Frederic Amiel
#35. Whenever conscience speaks with a divided, uncertain, and disputed voice, it is not the voice of God. Descend still deeper into yourself, until you hear nothing but a clear, undivided voice, a voice which does away with doubt and brings with it persuasion, light, and serenity.
Henri Frederic Amiel
#38. Time is the supreme illusion. It is but the inner prism by which we decompose being and life, the mode under which we perceive successively what is simultaneous in idea.
Henri Frederic Amiel
#40. I find myself regarding existence as though from beyond the tomb, from another world; all is strange to me; I am, as it were, outside my own body and individuality; I am depersonalized, detached, cut adrift. Is this madness?
Henri Frederic Amiel
#41. Hindoo wisdom long ago regarded the world as the dream of Brahma. Must we hold with Fichte that it is the individual dream of each individual ego? Every fool would then be a cosmogonic poet producing the firework of the universe under the dome of the infinite.
Henri Frederic Amiel
#43. A philosopher is aspires to explain away all mysteries, to dissolve them into light.
Henri Frederic Amiel
#45. Faith is certitude without proofs ... Faith is a sentiment, for it is a hope; it is an instinct, for it precedes all outward instruction.
Henri Frederic Amiel
#46. The ideal, after all, is true than the real: for the ideal is the eternal element in perishable things.
Henri Frederic Amiel
#48. 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.
Henri Frederic Amiel
#49. Everything which is, is thought, but not conscious and individual thought. The human intelligence is but the consciousness of being. It is what I have formulated before: Everything is a symbol of a symbol, and a symbol of what? of mind.
Henri Frederic Amiel
#50. The more a man loves, the more he suffers. The sum of possible grief for each soul is in proportion to its degree of perfection.
Henri Frederic Amiel
#51. War is a brutal and fierce means of pacification; it means the suppression of resistance by the destruction or enslavement of the conquered.
Henri Frederic Amiel
#52. Let us be true: this is the highest maxim of art and of life, the secret of eloquence and of virtue, and of all moral authority.
Henri Frederic Amiel
#53. Our dependence outweighs our independence, for we are independent only in our desire, while we are dependent on our health, on nature, on society, on everything in us and outside us.
Henri Frederic Amiel
#54. To know how to suggest is the great art of teaching. To attain it we must be able to guess what will interest; we must learn to read the childish soul as we might a piece of music. Then, by simply changing the key, we keep up the attraction and vary the song.
Henri Frederic Amiel
#57. Learn to ... be what you are, and learn to resign with a good grace all that you are not.
Henri Frederic Amiel
#58. Thought is a kind of opium; it can intoxicate us, while still broad awake; it can make transparent the mountains and everything that exists.
Henri Frederic Amiel
#59. Sacrifice, which is the passion of great souls, has never been the law of societies.
Henri Frederic Amiel
#60. How, then, find the courage for action? By slipping a little into unconsciousness, spontaneity, instinct which holds one to the earth and dictates the relatively good and useful. By accepting the human condition more simply, and candidly, by dreading troubles less, calculating less, hoping more.
Henri Frederic Amiel
#61. To feel keenly the poetry of a morning's roses, one has to have just escaped from the claws of this vulture which we call sickness.
Henri Frederic Amiel
#62. Every life is a profession of faith, and exercises an inevitable and silent influence.
Henri Frederic Amiel
#63. Self-interest is an inexhaustible source of convenient illusions. The number of beings who wish to see truly is extraordinarily small.
Henri Frederic Amiel
#64. Man never knows what he wants; he aspires to penetrate mysteries and as soon as he has, wants to re-establish them. Ignorance irritates him and knowledge cloys.
Henri Frederic Amiel
#65. The musician of the present day, not being able to give us what is beautiful, torments himself to give us what is new.
Henri Frederic Amiel
#66. 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.
Henri Frederic Amiel
#67. Religion is not a method, it is a life, a higher and supernatural life, mystical in its root and practical in its fruits; a communion with God, a calm and deep enthusiasm, a love which radiates, a force which acts, a happiness which overflows.
Henri Frederic Amiel
#68. Unconsciousness, spontaneity, instinct ... hold us to the earth and dictate the relatively good and useful.
Henri Frederic Amiel
#69. Do not despise your situation; in it you must act, suffer, and conquer. From every point on earth we are equally near to heaven and to the infinite.
Henri Frederic Amiel
#70. Doing easily what others find difficult is talent; doing what is impossible for talent is genius.
Henri Frederic Amiel
#71. Never to tire, never to grow cold; to be patient, sympathetic, tender; to look for the budding flower and the opening heart; to hope always; like God, to love always
this is duty.
Henri Frederic Amiel
#72. Life is short. We don't have much time to gladden the hearts of those who walk this way with us. So, be swift to love and make haste to be kind.
Henri Frederic Amiel
#73. Time and space are fragments of the infinite for the use of finite creatures.
Henri Frederic Amiel
#74. Sacrifice still exists everywhere, and everywhere the elect of each generation suffers for the salvation of the rest.
Henri Frederic Amiel
#76. Pure truth cannot be assimilated by the crowd; it must be communicated by contagion.
Henri Frederic Amiel
#77. Kindness is gladdening the hearts of those who are traveling the dark journey with us.
Henri Frederic Amiel
#78. Women wish to be loved not because they are pretty, or good, or well bred, or graceful, or intelligent, but because they are themselves.
Henri Frederic Amiel
#79. He who is too much afraid of being duped has lost the power of being magnanimous.
Henri Frederic Amiel
#80. Tell me what you feel in your room when the full moon is shining in upon you and your lamp is dying out, and I will tell you how old you are, and I shall know if you are happy.
Henri Frederic Amiel
#81. You desire to know the art of living, my friend? It is contained in one phrase: make use of suffering.
Henri Frederic Amiel
#82. At bottom there is but one subject of study: the forms and metamorphoses of mind. All other subjects may be reduced to that; all other studies bring us back to this study.
Henri Frederic Amiel
#83. To understand is to possess the thing understood, first by sympathy and then by intelligence.
Henri Frederic Amiel
#84. Without passion man is a mere latent force and possibility, like the flint which awaits the shock of the iron before it can give forth its spark.
Henri Frederic Amiel
#86. I'm not interested in age. People who tell me their age are silly. You're as old as you feel.
Henri Frederic Amiel
#88. Order means light and peace, inward liberty and free command over one's self; order is power.
Henri Frederic Amiel
#89. Liberty, equality - bad principles! The only true principle for humanity is justice; and justice to the feeble is protection and kindness.
Henri Frederic Amiel
#90. There is only one way of not hating those who do us wrong, and that is by doing them good.
Henri Frederic Amiel
#91. The soul may be immortal because she is fitted to rise towards that which is neither born nor dies, towards that which exists substantially, necessarily, invariably, that is to say towards God.
Henri Frederic Amiel
#93. Men prefer the false due to habit, passion, will. Preference for truth is rare. Men are ruled by their fear of truth.
Henri Frederic Amiel
#97. When everything is in its right place within us, we ourselves are in balance with the whole work of God.
Henri Frederic Amiel
#100. Latent genius is but a presumption. Everything that can be, is bound to come into being, and what never comes into being is nothing.
Henri Frederic Amiel
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