Henri-Frédéric Amiel Quotes
An error is the more dangerous in proportion to the degree of truth which it contains.
Henri-Frédéric Amiel
(The Journal Intime, 1852)
Dreams are excursions into the limbo of things, a semi-deliverance from the human prison.
To live we must conquer incessantly, we must have the courage to be happy.
Every life has its potentiality of greatness.
Woman is the salvation or the destruction of the family. She carries its destiny in the folds of her mantle.
Cleverness is serviceable for everything, sufficient for nothing.
The fire which enlightens is also the fire which consumes.
The man who has no inner life is the slave of his surroundings
We only understand that which already is within us.
Everything is a symbol of a symbol, and a symbol of what? of mind.
Society lives by faith, develops by science.
Blessed be childhood, which brings down something of heaven into the midst of our rough earthliness.
Action is only coarsened thought. Thought becomes concrete, obscure, and unconscious.
Health is the first of all liberties, and happiness gives us the energy which is the basis of health.
We must learn to detach ourselves from all that is capable of being lost, to bind ourselves absolutely only to what is absolute and eternal, and to enjoy the rest as a loan...
Truth is the secret of eloquence and of virtue, the basis of moral authority; it is the highest summit of art and life.
To do easily what is difficult for others is the mark of talent. To do what is impossible for talent is the mark of genius.
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.
We are never more discontented with others than when we are discontented with ourselves.
Thought is a kind of opium; it can intoxicate us, while still broad awake; it can make transparent the mountains and everything that exists.
You desire to know the art of living, my friend? It is contained in one phrase: make use of suffering.
To know how to grow old is the master-work of wisdom, and one of the most difficult chapters in the great art of living.
Common sense is the measure of the possible; it is composed of experience and prevision; it is calculation applied to life.
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.
Self-interest is but the survival of the animal in us. Humanity only begins for man with self-surrender.
The man who insists upon seeing with perfect clearness before he decides, never decides. Accept life, and you must accept regret.
Learn to limit yourself, to content yourself with some definite thing, and some definite work; dare to be what you are, and learn to resign with a good grace all that you are not.
There is no curing a sick man who believes himself to be in health.