Henri Frederic Amiel

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

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

Analysis kills spontaneity. The grain once ground into flour springs and germinates no more.

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

In every loving woman there is a priestess of the past - a pious guardian of some affection, of which the object has disappeared.

Our duty is to be useful, not according to our desires but according to our powers.

Let mystery have its place in you ; do not be always turning up your whole soil with the ploughshare of self-examination, but leave a little fallow corner in your heart ready for any seed the winds may bring.

Melancholy is at the bottom of everything, just as at the end of all rivers is the sea. Can it be otherwise in a world where nothing lasts, where all that we have loved or shall love must die? Is death, then, the secret of life? The gloom of an eternal mourning enwraps, more or less closely, every serious and thoughtful soul, as night enwraps the universe.

He who floats with the current, who does not guide himself according to higher principles, who has no ideal, no convictions-such a man is . . . a thing moved, instead of a living and moving being-an echo, not a voice. The man who has no inner-life is a slave of his surroundings as the barometer is the obedient servant of the air.

Are we not all shipwrecked,...condemned to death?... However impatient our neighbours make us, however much indignation our race arouses, we are all bound together, and the companions of a chain-gang have everything to lose by mutual insults.

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

[I]t is truth alone-scientific, established, proved, and rational truth-which is capable of satisfying nowadays the awakened minds of all classes. We may still say perhaps, 'faith governs the world,'-but the faith of the present is no longer in revelation or in the priest-it is in reason and in science.

Philosophy means the complete liberty of the mind, and therefore independence of all social, political or religious prejudice... It loves one thing only... truth.

Doubt of the reality of love ends by making us doubt everything.

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.