Henri Frederic Amiel Quotes

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

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.

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

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

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

It is not what he had, or even what he does which expresses the worth of a man, but what he is.

Latent genius is but a presumption. Everything that can be, is bound to come into being, and what never comes into being is nothing.

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

Each man enters into God so much as God enters into him.

We become actors without realizing it, and actors without wanting to.

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

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.

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.

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

Order is a great person's need and their true well being.

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

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.

Doubt is the accomplice of tyranny.

The only substance properly so called is the soul.

Time wasted is a theft from God.

The ideal, after all, is true than the real: for the ideal is the eternal element in perishable things.

The laws of animality govern almost the whole of history.

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.

Peace is not in itself a dream, but we know it only as the result of a momentary equilibrium--an accident.

Unconsciousness, spontaneity, instinct ... hold us to the earth and dictate the relatively good and useful.

Oh be swift to live, make haste to be kind.

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

The immense majority of our species are candidates for humanity, and nothing more.

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.

The art which is grand and yet simple is that which presupposes the greatest elevation both in artist and in public.

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

Order is man's greatest need, and his true well-being.

Put personal ambition away from you, and then you will find consolation in living or in dying, whatever may happen to you.

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

Self-interest is an inexhaustible source of convenient illusions. The number of beings who wish to see truly is extraordinarily small.

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

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.

Every life is a profession of faith.

The more a man loves, the more he suffers. The sum of possible grief for each soul is in proportion to its degree of perfection.

When everything has its proper place in our minds, we are able to stand in equilibrium with the rest of the world.

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

We are all visionaries, and what we see is our soul in things.

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.

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.

Emancipation from error is the condition of real knowledge.

Faith is certitude without proofs ... Faith is a sentiment, for it is a hope; it is an instinct, for it precedes all outward instruction.