Henri-Frédéric Amiel Quotes

155 Sourced Quotes

Liberty, equality - bad principles! The only true principle for humanity is justice; and justice to the feeble is protection and kindness.

Henri-Frédéric Amiel
Time is but the space between our memories; as soon as we cease to perceive this space, time has disappeared.

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

Henri-Frédéric Amiel
A journal takes the place of a confidant, that is, of friend or wife; it becomes a substitute for production, a substitute for country and public. It is a grief-cheating device, a mode of escape and withdrawal; but, factotum as it is, though it takes the place of everything, properly speaking it represents nothing at all...

Henri-Frédéric Amiel
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.

Henri-Frédéric Amiel
How, then, find the courage for action? By slipping a little into unconsciousness, spontaneity, instinct which holds one to the earth and dictates the relatively good and useful. By accepting the human condition more simply, and candidly, by dreading troubles less, calculating less, hoping more.

Henri-Frédéric Amiel
Nothing is more characteristic of a man than the manner in which he behaves toward fools.

Henri-Frédéric Amiel
The history of man is essentially zoological; it becomes human late in the day, and then only in the beautiful souls, the souls alive to justice, goodness, enthusiasm, and devotion. The angel shows itself rarely and with difficulty through the highly-organized brute.

Henri-Frédéric Amiel
Man is a passion which brings a will into play, which works an intelligence.

Henri-Frédéric Amiel
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.

Henri-Frédéric Amiel
Our dependence outweighs our independence, for we are independent only in our desire, while we are dependent on our health, on nature, on society, on everything in us and outside us.

Henri-Frédéric Amiel
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-Frédéric Amiel
One may guess the why and wherefore of a tear and yet find it too subtle to give any account of. A tear may be the poetical resume of so many simultaneous impressions, the quintessence of so many opposing thoughts! It is like a drop of one of those precious elixirs of the East which contain the life of twenty plants fused into a single aroma.

Henri-Frédéric Amiel
If man was what he ought to be, he would be adored by the animals...

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

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

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
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
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