Henri-Frédéric Amiel Quotes

155 Sourced Quotes

Thought is a kind of opium; it can intoxicate us, while still broad awake.

Henri-Frédéric Amiel
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-Frédéric Amiel
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-Frédéric Amiel
Doubt of the reality of love ends by making us doubt everything.

Henri-Frédéric Amiel
We are never more discontented with others than when we are discontented with ourselves.

Henri-Frédéric Amiel
Learn to limit yourself; to content yourself with some definite work; 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-Frédéric Amiel
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-Frédéric Amiel
You desire to know the art of living, my friend? It is contained in one phrase: make use of suffering.

Henri-Frédéric Amiel
There is no curing a sick man who believes himself to be in health.

Henri-Frédéric Amiel
Our duty is to be useful, not according to our desires but according to our powers.

Henri-Frédéric Amiel
Man is saved by love and duty, and by the hope that springs from duty, or rather from the moral facts of consciousness, as a flower springs from the soil.

Henri-Frédéric Amiel
Criticism is above all a gift, an intuition, a matter of tact and flair; it cannot be taught or demonstrated — it is an art.

Henri-Frédéric Amiel
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-Frédéric Amiel
What we call little things are merely the causes of great things; they are the beginning, the embryo, and it is the point of departure which, generally speaking, decides the whole future of an existence. One single black speck may be the beginning of gangrene, of a storm, of a revolution.

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

Henri-Frédéric Amiel
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 immense majority of our species are candidates for humanity, and nothing more.

Henri-Frédéric Amiel
To win true peace, a man needs to feel himself directed, pardoned, and sustained by a supreme power, to feel himself in the right road, at the point where God would have him be - in order with God and the universe. This faith gives strength and calm.

Henri-Frédéric Amiel
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-Frédéric Amiel
When I write for publication every word is misery, and my pen stumbles at every line, so anxious am I to find the ideally best expression, and so great is the number of possibilities which open before me at every step.

Henri-Frédéric Amiel