Henri-Frédéric Amiel Quotes

155 Sourced Quotes

A man only understands what is akin to something already existing in himself.

Henri-Frédéric Amiel
He who is too much afraid of being duped has lost the power of being magnanimous.

Henri-Frédéric Amiel
The habit of scientific analysis... exhausts the material offered to it...

Henri-Frédéric Amiel
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?

Henri-Frédéric Amiel
The obscure only exists that it may cease to exist. In it lies the opportunity of all victory and all progress. Whether it call itself fatality, death, night, or matter, it is the pedestal of life, of light, of liberty and the spirit. For it represents resistance -- that is to say, the fulcrum of all activity, the occasion for its development and its triumph.

Henri-Frédéric Amiel
The great majority of men are but tangled skeins, imperfect keyboards, so many specimens of restless or stagnant chaos--and what makes their situation almost hopeless is the fact that they take pleasure in it. There is no curing a sick man who believes himself in health.

Henri-Frédéric Amiel
Self-interest is an inexhaustible source of convenient illusions. The number of beings who wish to see truly is extraordinarily small.

Henri-Frédéric Amiel
A musical theme once exhausted, finds its due refuge and repose in silence.

Henri-Frédéric Amiel
To understand is to possess the thing understood, first by sympathy and then by intelligence.

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

Henri-Frédéric Amiel
The soul of nature is divined by the poet; the man of science only serves to accumulate materials for its demonstration.

Henri-Frédéric Amiel
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.

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

Henri-Frédéric Amiel
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-Frédéric Amiel
Nature does at least what she can to translate into visible form the wealth of the creative formula. By the vastness of the abysses into which she penetrates, in the effort--the unsuccessful effort--to house and contain the eternal thought, we may measure the greatness of the divine mind.

Henri-Frédéric Amiel
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-Frédéric Amiel
The musician of the present day, not being able to give us what is beautiful, torments himself to give us what is new.

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

Henri-Frédéric Amiel
It 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.

Henri-Frédéric Amiel
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-Frédéric Amiel
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-Frédéric Amiel
True poetry is truer than science, because it is synthetic, and seizes at once what the combination of all the sciences is able, at most, to attain as a final result.

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

Henri-Frédéric Amiel
Every situation is an equilibrium of forces; every life is a struggle between opposing forces working within the limits of a certain equilibrium

Henri-Frédéric Amiel
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-Frédéric Amiel
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-Frédéric Amiel
At the bottom of the modern man there is always a great thirst for self-forgetfulness, self-distraction... and therefore he turns away from all those problems and abysses which might recall to him his own nothingness.

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

Henri-Frédéric Amiel
Society lives by faith, develops by science.

Henri-Frédéric Amiel
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.

Henri-Frédéric Amiel