HENRI-FREDERIC AMIEL QUOTES
Swiss philosopher, poet & critic (1821-1881)
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.
HENRI-FREDERIC AMIEL
Journal Intime
A belief is not true because it is useful.
HENRI-FREDERIC AMIEL
Journal Intime
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-FREDERIC AMIEL
Journal Intime
A bubble of air in the blood, a drop of water in the brain, and a man is out of gear, his machine falls to pieces, his thought vanishes, the world disappears from him like a dream at morning. On what a spider thread is hung our individual existence!
HENRI-FREDERIC AMIEL
Journal Intime
The unfinished is nothing.
HENRI-FREDERIC AMIEL
Journal Intime
Heroism is the dazzling and glorious concentration of courage.
HENRI-FREDERIC AMIEL
Journal Intime
We are hemmed round with mystery, and the greatest mysteries are contained in what we see and do every day.
HENRI-FREDERIC AMIEL
Journal Intime
Life is short and we never have enough time for the hearts of those who travel the way with us. O, be swift to love!
HENRI-FREDERIC AMIEL
Journal Intime
The immense majority of our species are candidates for humanity, and nothing more.
HENRI-FREDERIC AMIEL
Journal Intime
Action is but coarsened thought; thought become concrete, obscure, and unconscious.
HENRI-FREDERIC AMIEL
Journal Intime
Charm: the quality in others that makes us more satisfied with ourselves.
HENRI-FREDERIC AMIEL
Journal Intime
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.
HENRI-FREDERIC AMIEL
Journal Intime
There is no repose for the mind except in the absolute; for feeling except in the infinite; for the soul except in the divine.
HENRI-FREDERIC AMIEL
introduction, Journal Intime
Woman is the salvation or destruction of the family. She carries its destinies in the folds of her mantle.
HENRI-FREDERIC AMIEL
journal, Dec. 11, 1872
There is nothing non-exclusive but the All; my end is communion with Being through the whole of Being.
HENRI-FREDERIC AMIEL
introduction, Journal Intime
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-FREDERIC AMIEL
Journal Intime
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?
HENRI-FREDERIC AMIEL
Journal Intime
Does this mean that I am an opponent of democracy? Not at all. Fiction for fiction, it is the least harmful. But it is well not to confound its promises with realities. The fiction consists in the postulate of all democratic government, that the great majority of the electors in a state are enlightened, free, honest, and patriotic--whereas such a postulate is a mere chimera. The majority in any state is necessarily composed of the most ignorant, the poorest, and the least capable; the state is therefore at the mercy of accident and passion, and it always ends by succumbing at one time or another to the rash conditions which have been made for its existence. A man who condemns himself to live upon the tight-rope must inevitably fall; one has no need to be a prophet to foresee such a result.
HENRI-FREDERIC AMIEL
Journal Intime
Joy is the vital air of the soul.
HENRI-FREDERIC AMIEL
Journal Intime
The ideal, after all, is true than the real: for the ideal is the eternal element in perishable things.
HENRI-FREDERIC AMIEL
Journal Intime