Henri Frederic Amiel Quotes
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A woman is sometimes fugitive, irrational, indeterminable, illogical and contradictory. A great deal of forbearance ought to be shown her, and a good deal of prudence exercised with regard to her, for she may bring about innumerable evils without knowing it. Capable of all kinds of devotion, and of all kinds of treason, monster incomprehensible, raised to the second power, she is at once the delight and the terror of man.
By Henri Frederic Amiel
Thought is a kind of opium; it can intoxicate us, while still broad awake; it can make transparent the mountains and everything that exists.
By Henri Frederic Amiel
What we call little things are merely the causes of great things; they are the beginning, the embryo, and it is the point of departure which, generally speaking, decides the whole future of an existence. One single black speck may be the beginning of a gangrene, of a storm, of a revolution.
By Henri Frederic Amiel
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.
By Henri Frederic Amiel
Obstinacy is will asserting itself without being able to justify itself. It is persistence without a reasonable motive. It is the tenacity of self-love substituted for that of reason and conscience.
By Henri Frederic Amiel
Self-interest is but the survival of the animal in us. Humanity only begins for man with self-surrender.
By Henri Frederic Amiel
Our true history is scarcely ever deciphered by others. The chief part of the drama is a monologue, or rather an intimate debate between God, our conscience, and ourselves. Tears, grieves, depressions, disappointments, irritations, good and evil thoughts, decisions, uncertainties, deliberations --all these belong to our secret, and are almost all incommunicable and intransmissible, even when we try to speak of them, and even when we write them down.
By Henri Frederic Amiel
Sacrifice still exists everywhere, and everywhere the elect of each generation suffers for the salvation of the rest.
By Henri Frederic Amiel
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.
By 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.
By Henri Frederic Amiel
The philosopher is like a man fasting in the midst of universal intoxication. He alone perceives the illusion of which all creatures are the willing playthings; he is less duped than his neighbor by his own nature. He judges more sanely, he sees things as they are. It is in this that his liberty consists -- in the ability to see clearly and soberly, in the power of mental record.
By Henri Frederic Amiel
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.
By Henri Frederic Amiel
The obscure only exists that it may cease to exist. In it lies the opportunity of all victory and all progress. Whether it call itself fatality, death, night, or matter, it is the pedestal of life, of light, of liberty and the spirit. For it represents resistance -- that is to say, the fulcrum of all activity, the occasion for its development and its triumph.
By Henri Frederic Amiel
Mozart has the classic purity of light and the blue ocean; Beethoven the romantic grandeur which belongs to the storms of air and sea, and while the soul of Mozart seems to dwell on the ethereal peaks of Olympus, that of Beethoven climbs shuddering the storm-beaten sides of a Sinai. Blessed be they both! Each represents a moment of the ideal life, each does us good. Our love is due to both.
By Henri Frederic Amiel
An error is the more dangerous in proportion to the degree of truth which it contains.
By Henri Frederic Amiel
Women wish to be loved not because they are pretty, or good, or well bred, or graceful, or intelligent, but because they are themselves.
By Henri Frederic Amiel
Mutual respect implies discretion and reserve even in love itself; it means preserving as much liberty as possible to those whose life we share. We must distrust our instinct of intervention, for the desire to make one's own will prevail is often disguised under the mask of solicitude.
By Henri Frederic Amiel