Frederic Amiel Quotes

#1. To shun one's cross is to make it heavier.

Henri Frederic Amiel

#2. About Jesus we must believe no one but himself.

Henri Frederic Amiel

#3. Hope is only the love of life.

Henri Frederic Amiel

#4. To live we must conquer incessantly, we must have the courage to be happy.

Henri Frederic Amiel

#5. Time is but the space between our memories; as soon as we cease to perceive this space, time has disappeared.

Henri Frederic Amiel

#6. 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

#7. Music is harmony, harmony is perfection, perfection is our dream, and our dream is heaven.

Henri Frederic Amiel

#8. Only evil grows of itself, while for goodness we want effort and courage.

Henri Frederic Amiel

#9. 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

#10. The beautiful souls of the world have an art of saintly alchemy, by which bitterness is converted into kindness, the gall of human experience into gentleness, ingratitude into benefits, insults into pardon.

Henri Frederic Amiel

#11. The man who insists upon seeing with perfect clearness before he decides, never decides. Accept life, and you must accept regret.

Henri Frederic Amiel

#12. We are always making God our accomplice so that we may legalize our own inequities.

Henri Frederic Amiel

#13. We are never more discontented with others than when we are discontented with ourselves.

Henri Frederic Amiel

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

Henri Frederic Amiel

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

Henri Frederic Amiel

#16. Knowledge, love, power-there is the complete life.

Henri Frederic Amiel

#17. The man who has no inner life is the slave of his surroundings.

Henri Frederic Amiel

#18. I am a spectator, so to speak, of the molecular whirlwind which men call individual life; I am conscious of an incessant metamorphosis, an irresistible movement of existence, which is going on within me
and this phenomenology of myself serves as a window opened upon the mystery of the world.

Henri Frederic Amiel

#19. 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

#20. There is no curing a sick man who believes himself to be in health.

Henri Frederic Amiel

#21. 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.

Henri Frederic Amiel

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

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

#24. Nothing is more characteristic of a man than the manner in which he behaves toward fools.

Henri Frederic Amiel

#25. Men of genius supply the substance of history, while the mass of men are but the critical filter, the limiting, slackening, passive force needed for the modification of ideas supplied by genius.

Henri Frederic Amiel

#26. Time is but the measure of the difficulty of a conception. Pure thought has scarcely any need of time, since it perceives the two ends of an idea almost at the same moment.

Henri Frederic Amiel

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

Henri Frederic Amiel

#28. To marry unequally is to suffer equally.

Henri Frederic Amiel

#29. Analysis kills spontaneity. The grain once ground into flour springs and germinates no more.

Henri Frederic Amiel

#30. Our life is nothing, it is true, but our life is divine. A breath of nature annihilates us, but we surpass nature in penetrating far beyond her vast phantasmagoria to the changeless and the eternal.

Henri Frederic Amiel

#31. 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

#32. Almost everything comes from almost nothing.

Henri Frederic Amiel

#33. To do easily what is difficult for others is the mark of talent. To do what is impossible for talent is the mark of genius.

Henri Frederic Amiel

#34. Sadness takes up the pen more readily than joy.

Henri Frederic Amiel

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

Henri Frederic Amiel

#36. 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

#37. The stationary condition is the beginning of the end

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

#39. Will localizes us, thought universalizes us.

Henri Frederic Amiel

#40. Materialism coarsens and petrifies everything, making everything vulgar, and every truth false.

Henri Frederic Amiel

#41. An error is the more dangerous the more truth it contains.

Henri Frederic Amiel

#42. Every living being seeks instinctively to complete itself.

Henri Frederic Amiel

#43. He who is silent is forgotten; he who does not advance falls back; he who stops is overwhelmed; out distanced, crushed; he who ceases to grow becomes smaller; he who leaves off, gives up; the condition of standing still is the beginning of the end.

Henri Frederic Amiel

#44. 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

#45. To be misunderstood even by those whom one loves is the cross and bitterness of life. It is the secret of that sad and melancholy smile on the lips of great men which so few understand.

Henri Frederic Amiel

#46. Doubt of the reality of love ends by making us doubt everything.

Henri Frederic Amiel

#47. Man is a passion which brings a will into play, which works an intelligence.

Henri Frederic Amiel

#48. It is by teaching that we teach ourselves.

Henri Frederic Amiel

#49. Every man is a priest, even involuntarily; his conduct is an unspoken sermon, which is forever preaching to others.

Henri Frederic Amiel

#50. To depersonalize man is the dominant drift of our times.

Henri Frederic Amiel

#51. 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.

Henri Frederic Amiel

#52. Destiny has two ways of crushing us - by refusing our wishes and by fulfilling them.

Henri Frederic Amiel

#53. 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.

Henri Frederic Amiel

#54. The test of every religious, political, or educational system is the men which it forms

Henri Frederic Amiel

#55. When we are doing nothing in particula, it is then that we are living through all our being.

Henri Frederic Amiel

#56. 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

#57. The unfinished is nothing.

Henri Frederic Amiel

#58. 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

#59. Before giving advice we must have secured its acceptance, or, rather, have made it desired.

Henri Frederic Amiel

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

Henri Frederic Amiel

#61. An error is the more dangerous in proportion to the degree of truth which it contains.

Henri Frederic Amiel

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

Henri Frederic Amiel

#63. Men don't achieve truth because they lack humility and love of truth. They won't criticize their own beliefs. Truth would overwhelm them.

Henri Frederic Amiel

#64. Let the living live; and you, gather together your thoughts, leave behind you a legacy of feeling and ideas; you will be most useful so.

Henri Frederic Amiel

#65. Oh be swift to live, make haste to be kind.

Henri Frederic Amiel

#66. Peace is not in itself a dream, but we know it only as the result of a momentary equilibrium
an accident.

Henri Frederic Amiel

#67. Great men are the real men, in them nature has succeeded.

Henri Frederic Amiel

#68. Are we not all shipwrecked, ... condemned to death? ... However impatient our neighbours make us, however much indignation our race arouses, we are all bound together, and the companions of a chain-gang have everything to lose by mutual insults ...

Henri Frederic Amiel

#69. There are 2 sorts of pride: one in which we approve others, the other in which we cannot accept ourselves.

Henri Frederic Amiel

#70. A modest garden contains, for those who know how to look and to wait, more instruction than a library.

Henri Frederic Amiel

#71. There is no repose for the mind except in the absolute; for feeling, except in the infinite; for the soul, except in the divine.

Henri Frederic Amiel

#72. The laws of animality govern almost the whole of history.

Henri Frederic Amiel

#73. What we do not understand we have no right to judge

Henri Frederic Amiel

#74. [T]he habit of scientific analysis ... exhausts the material offered to it ...

Henri Frederic Amiel

#75. Common sense is calculation applied to life.

Henri Frederic Amiel

#76. Conquering any difficulty always gives one a secret joy, for it means pushing back a boundary line and adding to one's liberty.

Henri Frederic Amiel

#77. 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

#78. Happiness has no limits, because God has neither bottom nor bounds, and because happiness is nothing but the conquest of God through love.

Henri Frederic Amiel

#79. 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.

Henri Frederic Amiel

#80. Uncertainty is the refuge of hope.

Henri Frederic Amiel

#81. Life is short and we never have enough time for the hearts of those who travel the way with us. O, be swift to love! Make haste to be kind.

Henri Frederic Amiel

#82. 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

#83. Clever people will recognize and tolerate nothing but cleverness.

Henri Frederic Amiel

#84. For purposes of action nothing is more useful than narrowness of thought combined with energy of will.

Henri Frederic Amiel

#85. The growth and development of the soul is more important than power and glory.

Henri Frederic Amiel

#86. If man was what he ought to be, he would be adored by the animals ...

Henri Frederic Amiel

#87. Heroism is the brilliant triumph of the soul over the flesh - over fear ... Heroism is the dazzling and glorious concentration of courage.

Henri Frederic Amiel

#88. 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

#89. Before crime is committed conscience must be corrupted, and every bad man who succeeds in reaching a high point of wickedness begins with this.

Henri Frederic Amiel

#90. A belief is not true because it is useful

Henri Frederic Amiel

#91. Blessed be childhood, which brings down something of heaven into the midst of our rough earthliness.

Henri Frederic Amiel

#92. Every landscape is, as it were, a state of the soul, and whoever penetrates into both is astonished to find how much likeness there is in each detail.

Henri Frederic Amiel

#93. Tears are the symbol of the inability of the soul to restrain its emotion and retain its self command.

Henri Frederic Amiel

#94. 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

#95. A thousand things advance; nine hundred and ninety nine retreat; That is progress.

Henri Frederic Amiel

#96. 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

#97. 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

#98. Woman is the salvation or the destruction of the family. She carries its destiny in the folds of her mantle.

Henri Frederic Amiel

#99. Any landscape is a condition of the spirit.

Henri Frederic Amiel

#100. From every spot on earth we are equally near heaven and the infinite.

Henri Frederic Amiel