Henri-Frédéric Amiel Quotes

155 Sourced Quotes

Melancholy is at the bottom of everything, just as at the end of all rivers is the sea. Can it be otherwise in a world where nothing lasts, where all that we have loved or shall love must die? Is death, then, the secret of life? The gloom of an eternal mourning enwraps, more or less closely, every serious and thoughtful soul, as night enwraps the universe.

Henri-Frédéric Amiel
The test of every religious, political, or educational system is the man that it forms.

Henri-Frédéric Amiel
Woman is the salvation or the destruction of the family. She carries its destiny in the folds of her mantle.

Henri-Frédéric Amiel
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.

Henri-Frédéric Amiel
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...

Henri-Frédéric Amiel
Philosophy means the complete liberty of the mind, and therefore independence of all social, political or religious prejudice... It loves one thing only... truth.

Henri-Frédéric Amiel
A thousand things advance, nine hundred and ninety-eight retreat: this is progress.

Henri-Frédéric Amiel
Wisdom consists in rising superior both to madness and to common sense, and in lending one's self to the universal delusion without becoming its dupe.

Henri-Frédéric Amiel
Life is the apprenticeship to progressive renunciation, to the steady diminution of our claims, of our hopes, of our powers, of our liberty.

Henri-Frédéric Amiel
Doing easily what others find difficult is talent; doing what is impossible for talent is genius.

Henri-Frédéric Amiel
Liberty, equality, — bad principles! The only true principle for humanity is justice, and justice towards the feeble becomes necessarily protection or kindness.

Henri-Frédéric Amiel
The ideal, after all, is truer than the real: for the ideal is the eternal element in perishable things.

Henri-Frédéric Amiel
When everything is in its right place within us, we ourselves are in balance with the whole work of God.

Henri-Frédéric Amiel
In health there is freedom. Health is the first of all liberties.

Henri-Frédéric Amiel
Without faith a man can do nothing. But faith can stifle all science.

Henri-Frédéric Amiel
Jealousy is a terrible thing. It resembles love, only it is precisely love's contrary. Instead of wishing for the welfare of the object loved, it desires the dependence of that object upon itself, and its own triumph.

Henri-Frédéric Amiel
Life is but a daily oscillation between revolt and submission.

Henri-Frédéric Amiel
There is no repose for the mind except in the absolute; for feeling except in the infinite; for the soul except in the divine. 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. There is nothing non-exclusive but the All; my end is communion with Being through the whole of Being.

Henri-Frédéric Amiel
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.

Henri-Frédéric Amiel
Common sense is the measure of the possible; it is composed of experience and prevision; it is calculation applied to life.

Henri-Frédéric Amiel
It is by teaching that we teach ourselves, by relating that we observe, by affirming that we examine, by showing that we look, by writing that we think, by pumping that we draw water into the well.

Henri-Frédéric Amiel
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-Frédéric Amiel
Heroism is the brilliant triumph of the soul over the flesh — that is to say, over fear: fear of poverty, of suffering, of calumny, of sickness, of isolation, and of death. There is no serious piety without heroism. Heroism is the dazzling and glorious concentration of courage.

Henri-Frédéric Amiel
Sacrifice, which is the passion of great souls, has never been the law of societies.

Henri-Frédéric Amiel
We are all visionaries, and what we see is our soul in things.

Henri-Frédéric Amiel
Time and space are fragments of the infinite for the use of finite creatures.

Henri-Frédéric Amiel
Charm: the quality in others that makes us more satisfied with ourselves.

Henri-Frédéric Amiel
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-Frédéric Amiel
[There still remains the question whether] he who discovers a new world in the depths of the invisible would not do wisely to plant on it a flag known to himself alone, and, like Achilles, "devour his heart in secret;" whether the greatest problems which have ever been guessed on earth had not better have remained buried in the brain which had found the key to them, and whether the deepest thinkers — those whose hand has been boldest in drawing aside the veil, and their eye keenest in fathoming the mysteries beyond it — had not better, like the prophetess of Ilion, have kept for heaven, and heaven only, secrets and mysteries which human tongue cannot truly express, nor human intelligence conceive.

Henri-Frédéric Amiel
True love is that which ennobles the personality, fortifies the heart, and sanctifies the existence.

Henri-Frédéric Amiel