Henri Frederic Amiel Quotes

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

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

Society lives by faith, and develops by science.

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

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

Analysis kills spontaneity.

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.

Clever people will recognize and tolerate nothing but cleverness.

Pay bad people with your goodness; fight their hatred with your kindness. Even if you do not achieve a victory over other people, you will conquer yourself.

Accept life, and you must accept regret.

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

Philosophy starts with doubt and loves only truth.

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.

Every life is a profession of faith, and exercises an inevitable and silent influence.

He who is too much afraid of being duped has lost the power of being magnanimous.

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.

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.

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.

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

Sympathy is the first condition of criticism.

Life is an apprenticeship to the constant renunciations, to the steady failure of our claims, our hopes, our powers, our liberty.

Common sense is the measure of the possible.

Love is faith and one faith leads to another.

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

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

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

Common sense is calculation applied to life.

We are always making God our accomplice so that we may legalize our own inequities.

Righteous ends, thus approved, absolve of guilt the most violent means.

If nationality is consent, the state is compulsion.

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.

It is dangerous to abandon one's self to the luxury of grief; it deprives one of courage, and even of the wish for recovery.

The growth and development of the soul is more important than power and glory.

There is only one way of not hating those who do us wrong, and that is by doing them good.

Time and space are fragments of the infinite for the use of finite creatures.

Cleverness is serviceable for everything, sufficient for nothing.

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

Almost everything comes from almost nothing.

To marry unequally is to suffer equally.

The great artist and thinker are the simplifiers.

Heroism is the brilliant triumph of the soul over the flesh - over fear...Heroism is the dazzling and glorious concentration of courage.

The only substance properly so called is the soul.

Every living being seeks instinctively to complete itself.

What governs men is the fear of truth.

Man never knows what he wants; he aspires to penetrate mysteries and as soon as he has, wants to re-establish them. Ignorance irritates him and knowledge cloys.

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

To do what is impossible for talent is the mark of genius.

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.

Order means light and peace, inward liberty and free command over one's self; order is power.

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.