Henri Quotes

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

Life alone can rekindle life.

To know where one is going and what one wishes - this is order ... to organize one's life to distribute one's time ... all this belong to and is included in the word order.

Nothing resembles pride so much as discouragement.

Great men are the real men, in them nature has succeeded.

To depersonalize man is the dominant drift of our times.

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

In order to see Christianity, one must forget all the Christians.

Happiness does away with ugliness, and even makes the beauty of beauty.

Men of genius supply the substance of history, while the mass of men are but the critical filter, the limiting, slackening, passive force needed for the modification of ideas supplied by genius.

Society rests upon conscience, not upon science.

Sympathy is the first condition of criticism; reason and justice presuppose, at their origin, emotion.

War is a brutal and fierce means of pacification; it means the suppression of resistance by the destruction or enslavement of the conquered.

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

True poetry is truer than science, because it is synthetic, and seizes at once what the combination of all the sciences is able, at most, to attain as a final result.

I do not deny the rights of democracy, but I have no illusions as to the uses that will be made of those rights so long as wisdom is rare and pride abundant

Man is a passion which brings a will into play, which works an intelligence.

To understand is to possess the thing understood, first by sympathy and then by intelligence.

To be misunderstood even by those whom one loves is the cross and bitterness of life. It is the secret of that sad and melancholy smile on the lips of great men which so few understand.

Our greatest illusion is to believe that we are what we think ourselves to be.

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

The musician of the present day, not being able to give us what is beautiful, torments himself to give us what is new.

The unfinished is nothing.

From every spot on earth we are equally near heaven and the infinite.

When everything is in its right place within us, we ourselves are in balance with the whole work of God.

It is true that the environment does have an influence but what has much greater effect on the artist is love or hatred.He uses his setting to express these things.

The great artist is conscious of the talent and power he possesses otherwise he would not see his faults and so would not be able to improve.

An art form requires genius. People of genius are always troublemakers, meaning they start from scratch, demolish accepted norms, and rebuild a new world.

...I am driven on by an idea that I really only grasp as it grows with the picture.

A painting in an interior spreads joy around it by the colors, which calm us.

For my part I have never avoided the influence of others. I would have considered it cowardice and a lack of sincerity toward myself.

A work of art must carry in itself its complete significance and impose it upon the beholder even before he can identify the subject-matter.

Creation is the artist's true function; where there is no creation there is no art.

If my story were ever to be written truthfully from start to finish, it would amaze everyone.

The Barnes Foundation is the only sane place to see art in America.

A new painting is a unique event, a birth, which enriches the universe as it is grasped by the human mind, by bringing a new form into it.

How do you pray? Take the gospel of each day and spend ten minutes with it. Read it, and read it again. Walk into the world with the gospel in your heart.

God doesn't give us just enough. God gives us more than enough: more bread and fish than we can eat, more love than we dared to ask for.

The beginning and the end of all Christian leadership is to give your life for others.

Prayer is not a pious decoration of life but the breath of human existence.

The great call for the Church is to not just be concerned about right or wrong behavior, which is moral life, but about communion with God, which is mystical life.

When we learn to move through suffering, rather than avoid it, then we greet it differently. We become willing to let it teach us. We even begin to see how God can use it for some larger end.

Forgiveness indeed heals memories

Too many of us are lonely ministers practicing a lonely ministry.

Prayer is the most concrete way to make our home in God.

The great #‎ conversion called for by Jesus is to move from belonging to the world to belonging to God.

The tragedy of our lives is that, while we suffer from the wounds afflicted on us by those who love us, we cannot avoid wounding those we want to love.

To the degree that we embrace the truth that our identity is not rooted in our success, power, or popularity, but in God's infinite love, to that degree can we let go of our need to judge.

People forget ideas; they don't forget the real presence.

Solitude is an essential element for the spiritual health of a child. If we only stimulate our children - keep them busy with endless stories with no space to be alone - that's not good.