Henri Frederic Amiel Quotes

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

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

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

It gives liberty and breadth to thought, to learn to judge our own epoch from the point of view of universal history, history from the point of view of geological periods, geology from the point of view of astronomy.

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.

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

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

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

The art which is grand and yet simple is that which presupposes the greatest elevation both in artist and in public.

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.

Each bud flowers but once and each flower has but its minute of perfect beauty; so, in the garden of the soul each feeling has, as it were, its flowering instant, its one and only moment of expansive grace and radiant kingship.

all appears to change when we change

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.

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

To depersonalize man is the dominant drift of our times.

I can find no words for what I feel. My consciousness is withdrawn into itself; I hear my heart beating, and my life passing. It seems to me that I have become a statue on the banks of the river of time, that I am the spectator of some mystery, and shall issue from it old, or no longer capable of age.

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

At the bottom of the modern man there is always a great thirst for self-forgetfulness, self-distraction; he has a secret horror of all which makes him feel his own littleness; the eternal, the infinite, perfection, therefore scare and terrify him. He wishes to approve himself, to admire and congratulate himself; and therefore he turns away from all those problems and abysses which might recall to him his own nothingness.

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.

I wonder whether I should gain anything by the attempt to assume a character which is not mine. My wavering manner, born of doubt and scruple, has at least the advantage of rendering all the different shades of my thought, and of being sincere. If it were to become terse, affirmative, resolute, would it not be a mere imitation?

Uncertainty is the refuge of hope.

To marry unequally is to suffer equally.

There is only one way of not hating those who do us wrong, and that is by doing them good.

Our greatest illusion is to believe that we are what we think ourselves to be.

Time and space are fragments of the infinite for the use of finite creatures.

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.

The stationary condition is the beginning of the end

The fire which enlightens is the same fire which consumes.

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.

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

The great artist and thinker are the simplifiers.

Mutual respect implies discretion and reserve even in love itself; it means preserving as much liberty as possible to those whose life we share. We must distrust our instinct of intervention, for the desire to make one's own will prevail is often disguised under the mask of solicitude.

The philosopher aspires to explain away all mysteries, to dissolve them into light. Mystery, on the other hand, is demanded and pursued by the religious instinct; mystery constitutes the essence of worship.

To know how to suggest is the art of teaching.

Doubt is the accomplice of tyranny.

Charm is the quality in others that makes us more satisfied with ourselves.

Mother of Marvels, mysterious and tender Nature, why do we not live more in thee.

Spite is anger which is afraid to show itself, it is an impotent fury conscious of its impotence.

[I]t is truth alone-scientific, established, proved, and rational truth-which is capable of satisfying nowadays the awakened minds of all classes. We may still say perhaps, 'faith governs the world,'-but the faith of the present is no longer in revelation or in the priest-it is in reason and in science.

Every living being seeks instinctively to complete itself.

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.

It would have been a joy to me to be smiled upon, loved, encouraged, welcomed, and to obtain what I was so ready to give, kindness and goodwill. But to hunt down consideration and reputation
to force the esteem of others
seemed to me an effort unworthy of myself, almost a degradation.

The mind must have for ballast the clear conception of duty, if it is not to fluctuate between levity and despair.

Happiness gives us the energy which is the basis of health.

Time wasted is a theft from God.

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

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.

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.

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

What we call little things are merely the causes of great things.

It is not what he has, nor even what he does, which directly expresses the worth of a man, but what he is.

Love is faith and one faith leads to another.

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

Men prefer the false due to habit, passion, will. Preference for truth is rare. Men are ruled by their fear of truth.

If nationality is consent, the state is compulsion.

Sadness takes up the pen more readily than joy.

Nothing finite is true, is interesting, is worthy to fix my attention. All that is particular is exclusive, and all that is exclusive repels me.

Doing easily what others find difficult is talent; doing what is impossible for talent is genius.

Common sense is calculation applied to life.

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.

Action and faith enslave thought, both of them in order not be troubled or inconvenienced by reflection, criticism, and doubt.

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

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.

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

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

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.

Man is a willful and covetous animal, who makes use of his intellect to satisfy his inclinations, but who cares nothing for truth, who rebels against personal discipline, who hates disinterested thought and the idea of self-education. Wisdom offends him, because it rouses in him disturbance and confusion, and because he will not see himself as he is.

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

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

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.

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

Composition is a process of combination, in which thought puts together complementary truths, and talent fuses into harmony the most contrary qualities of style. So that there is no composition without effort, without pain even, as in all bringing forth. The reward is the giving birth to something living
something, that is to say, which, by a kind of magic, makes a living unity out of such opposed attributes as orderliness and spontaneity, thought and imagination, solidity and charm.

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.

The only substance properly so called is the soul.

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.

Hope is only the love of life.

The philosopher is like a man fasting in the midst of universal intoxication. He alone perceives the illusion of which all creatures are the willing playthings; he is less duped than his neighbour by his own nature.

Sacrifice, which is the passion of great souls, has never been the law of societies.

A belief is not true simply because it is useful.

If ignorance and passion are the foes of popular morality, it must be confessed that moral indifference is the malady of the cultivated classes.

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

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

Unconsciousness, spontaneity, instinct ... hold us to the earth and dictate the relatively good and useful.

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

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.

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

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

Kindness is gladdening the hearts of those who are traveling the dark journey with us.

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

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

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.

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 ...

At bottom, everything depends upon the presence or absence of one single element in the soul - HOPE

I begin to realize that my memory is a great catacomb, and that below my actual standing-ground there is layer after layer of historical ashes.
Is the life of mind something like that of great trees of immemorial growth? Is the living layer of consciousness super-imposed upon hundreds of dead layers? Dead? No doubt this is too much to say, but still, when memory is slack the past becomes almost as though it had never been. To remember that we did know once is not a sign of possession but a sign of loss; it is like the number of an engraving which is no longer on its nail, the title of a volume no longer to be found on its shelf. My mind is the empty frame of a thousand vanished images.

Man becomes man only by his intelligence, but he is man only by his heart.

I have never felt any inward assurance of genius, or any presentiment of glory or of happiness. I have never seen myself in imagination great or famous, or even a husband, a father, an influential citizen. This indifference to the future, this absolute self-distrust, are, no doubt, to be taken as signs. What dreams I have are all vague and indefinite; I ought not to live, for I am now scarcely capable of living.

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.

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.

Righteous ends, thus approved, absolve of guilt the most violent means.

Emancipation from error is the condition of real knowledge.