Henri Frederic Amiel quotes:

Life is short and we have never too much time for gladdening the hearts of those who are travelling the dark journey with us. Oh be swift to love, make haste to be kind.

There is no respect for others without humility in one's self.

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.

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

Self-interest is but the survival of the animal in us. Humanity only begins for man with self-surrender.

Society lives by faith, and develops by science.

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

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

The man who insists upon seeing with perfect clearness before he decides, never decides. Accept life, and you must accept regret.

He who asks of life nothing but the improvement of his own nature... is less liable than anyone else to miss and waste life.

Conquering any difficulty always gives one a secret joy, for it means pushing back a boundary-line and adding to one's liberty.

Tears are the symbol of the inability of the soul to restrain its emotion and retain its self command.

Learn to... be what you are, and learn to resign with a good grace all that you are not.

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

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.

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

Everything you need for better future and success has already been written. And guess what? All you have to do is go to the library.

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

Analysis kills spontaneity.

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.

To shun one's cross is to make it heavier.

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.

The best path through life is the highway.

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

Music is harmony, harmony is perfection, perfection is our dream, and our dream is heaven.

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

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

Any landscape is a condition of the spirit.

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

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."

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

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

The beautiful souls of the world have an art of saintly alchemy, by which bitterness is converted into kindness, the gall of human experience into gentleness, ingratitude into benefits, insults into pardon.

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.

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?

Love is like swallowing hot chocolate before it has cooled off. It takes you by surprise at first, but keeps you warm for a long time.

Clever people will recognize and tolerate nothing but cleverness.

Cleverness is serviceable for everything, sufficient for nothing.

Knowledge, love, power-there is the complete life.

Thankfulness is the beginning of gratitude. Gratitude is the completion of thankfulness. Thankfulness may consist merely of words. Gratitude is shown in acts.

If nationality is consent, the state is compulsion.

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...

Pure truth cannot be assimilated by the crowd; it must be communicated by contagion.

True humility is contentment.

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.

Wisdom consists in rising superior both to madness and to common sense, and is lending oneself to the universal illusion without becoming its dupe.

Tell me what you feel in your room when the full moon is shining in upon you and your lamp is dying out, and I will tell you how old you are, and I shall know if you are happy.

The test of every religious, political, or educational system, is the man which it forms. If a system injures the intelligence it is bad. If it injures the character it is vicious. If it injures the conscience it is criminal.

Let us be true: this is the highest maxim of art and of life, the secret of eloquence and of virtue, and of all moral authority.

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.

The fire which enlightens is the same fire which consumes.

Great men are true men, the men in whom nature has succeeded. They are not extraordinary - they are in the true order. It is the other species of men who are not what they ought to be.

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

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

I'm not interested in age. People who tell me their age are silly. You're as old as you feel.

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

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.

To live we must conquer incessantly, we must have the courage to be happy.

Women wish to be loved without a why or a wherefore; not because they are pretty, or good, or well-bred, or graceful, or intelligent, but because they are themselves.

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.

To be always ready a man must be able to cut a knot, for everything cannot be untied.

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

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

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

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.

Our true history is scarcely ever deciphered by others. The chief part of the drama is a monologue, or rather an intimate debate between God, our conscience, and ourselves. Tears, grieves, depressions, disappointments, irritations, good and evil thoughts, decisions, uncertainties, deliberations --all these belong to our secret, and are almost all incommunicable and intransmissible, even when we try to speak of them, and even when we write them down.

In health there is freedom. Health is the first of all liberties.

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.

Obstinacy is will asserting itself without being able to justify itself. It is persistence without a reasonable motive. It is the tenacity of self-love substituted for that of reason and conscience.

Thought is a kind of opium; it can intoxicate us, while still broad awake; it can make transparent the mountains and everything that exists.

Life is but a daily oscillation between revolt and submission.

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.

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.

In every loving woman there is a priestess of the past - a pious guardian of some affection, of which the object has disappeared.

In every loving woman there is a priestess of the past

An error is the more dangerous in proportion to the degree of truth which it contains.

Doubt of the reality of love ends by making us doubt everything.

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

So long as a person is capable of self-renewal they are a living being. -Henri

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

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.

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 ...

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.

The man who has no inner-life is a slave to his surroundings.

Uncertainty is the refuge of hope.

The unfinished is nothing.

Common sense is calculation applied to life.

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

For purposes of action nothing is more useful than narrowness of thought combined with energy of will.

We are never more discontented with others than when we are discontented with ourselves.

Work while you have the light. You are responsible for the talent that has been entrusted to you.

The only substance properly so called is the soul.

So long as a person is capable of self-renewal they are a living being.

[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.

[T]he habit of scientific analysis ... exhausts the material offered to it...

A belief is not true simply because it is useful.

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

A man without passion is only a latent force, only a possibility, like a stone waiting for the blow from the iron to give forth sparks

A microscopic phantom of the universe; this is all that we are able to be.

A modest garden contains, for those who know how to look and to wait, more instruction than a library.

A musical theme once exhausted, finds its due refuge and repose in silence.

A philosopher is aspires to explain away all mysteries, to dissolve them into light.

A thousand things advance; nine hundred and ninety nine retreat; That is progress.

A woman is sometimes fugitive, irrational, indeterminable, illogical and contradictory. A great deal of forbearance ought to be shown her, and a good deal of prudence exercised with regard to her, for she may bring about innumerable evils without knowing it. Capable of all kinds of devotion, and of all kinds of treason, monster incomprehensible, raised to the second power, she is at once the delight and the terror of man.

About Jesus we must believe no one but himself.

Accept life, and you must accept regret.

Almost everything comes from almost nothing.

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...

As it is impossible to be outside God, the best is consciously to dwell in Him.

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.

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

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

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

Christianity, if it is to triumph over pantheism, must absorb it. To our pusillanimous eyes Jesus would have borne the marks of a hateful pantheism, for he confirmed the Biblical phrase "ye are gods," and so would St. Paul, who tells us that we are of "the race of God." Our century wants a new theology - that is to say, a more profound explanation of the nature of Christ and of the light which it flashes upon heaven and upon humanity.

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.

Common sense is the measure of the possible.

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.

Criticism is above all a gift, an intuition, a matter of tact and flair; it cannot be taught or demonstrated--it is an art. Critical genius means an aptitude for discerning truth under appearances or in disguises which conceal it; for discovering it in spite of the errors of testimony, the frauds of tradition, the dust of time, the loss or alteration of texts. It is the sagacity of the hunter whom nothing deceives for long, and whom no ruse can throw off the trail.

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.

Doubt is the accomplice of tyranny.