Explore Quotes by Henri Frederic Amiel

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

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

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

The great artist and thinker are the simplifiers.

Our systems, perhaps, are nothing more than an unconscious apology for our faults, a gigantic scaffolding whose object is to hide from us our favorite sin.

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.

It is by teaching that we teach ourselves, by relating that we observe, by affirming that we examine, by showing that we look, by writing that we think, by pumping that we draw water into the well.

The only substance properly so called is the soul.

Society lives by faith, and develops by science.

Self-interest is but the survival of the animal in us. Humanity only begins for man with self-surrender.

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

If nationality is consent, the state is compulsion.

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

For purposes of action nothing is more useful than narrowness of thought combined with energy of will.

Cleverness is serviceable for everything, sufficient for nothing.

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

Without passion man is a mere latent force and possibility, like the flint which awaits the shock of the iron before it can give forth its spark.

To repel one's cross is to make it heavier.

To marry unequally is to suffer equally.

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

Sacrifice, which is the passion of great souls, has never been the law of societies.