Henri Frederic Amiel
33 quotations
The best path through life is the highway.
Destiny has two ways of crushing us -- by refusing our wishes and by fulfilling them.
Doing easily what others find difficult is talent; doing what is impossible for talent is genius.
Analysis kills spontaneity. The grain once ground into flour springs and germinates no more.
To live we must conquer incessantly, we must have the courage to be happy.
Every life is a profession of faith, and exercises an inevitable and silent influence.
Clever people will recognize and tolerate nothing but cleverness.
We become actors without realizing it, and actors without wanting to.
To marry unequally is to suffer equally.
Materialism coarsens and petrifies everything, making everything vulgar, and every truth false.
An error is the more dangerous in proportion to the degree of truth which it contains.
Order is a great person's need and their true well being.
Order is power.
The fire which enlightens is the same fire which consumes.
Our duty is to be useful, not according to our desires, but according to our powers.
We are never more discontented with others than when we are discontented with ourselves.
To depersonalize man is the dominant drift of our times.
There is no respect for others without humility in one's self.
To shun one's cross is to make it heavier.
Sacrifice, which is the passion of great souls, has never been the law of societies.
Society lives by faith, and develops by science.
The only substance properly so called is the soul.
If nationality is consent, the state is compulsion.
Action is coarsened thought; thought becomes concrete, obscure, and unconscious.
So long as a person is capable of self-renewal they are a living being.