Inspirational Quotes by Henri Frederic Amiel (Swiss Philosopher, Writer)

Inspirational Quotations by Henri Frederic Amiel (Swiss Philosopher, Writer)

Henri Frédéric Amiel (1821–81) was a Swiss moral philosopher, poet, and critic.

Born in Geneva, Amiel lost his parents at an early age. He traveled widely, became intimate with the intellectual leaders of Europe, and made a unique study of German philosophy in Berlin. He became a professor of aesthetics (1849) and moral philosophy (1853–81) at the Academy of Geneva.

Amiel published some essays and poems, but his fame as an intellectual and a critic rest on his diaries (1847 onwards,) published posthumously as Journal in Time (1883; Private Journal.) British writer Mary Augusta Ward, at the suggestion of academic Mark Pattison, translated it into English.

More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Henri Frederic Amiel

Order means light and peace, inward liberty and free command over one’s self; order is power.
—Henri Frederic Amiel
Topics: Order

There is no respect for others without humility in one’s self.
—Henri Frederic Amiel
Topics: Respectability, Respect

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.
—Henri Frederic Amiel
Topics: Talent, Genius

Destiny has two ways of crushing us—by refusing our wishes and by fulfilling them.
—Henri Frederic Amiel
Topics: Fate, Wishes, Perspective

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.
—Henri Frederic Amiel
Topics: Teaching, Teachers, Education

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.
—Henri Frederic Amiel
Topics: Sadness

Life is short and we have never too much time for gladdening the hearts of those who are travelling the dark journey with us. Oh be swift to love, make haste to be kind.
—Henri Frederic Amiel
Topics: Living, Kindness, Nature, Life

Common sense is the measure of the possible; it is composed of experience and prevision; it is calculation applied to life.
—Henri Frederic Amiel
Topics: Experience, Common Sense

Materialism coarsens and petrifies everything, making everything vulgar, and every truth false.
—Henri Frederic Amiel
Topics: Consumerism

Learn to … be what you are, and learn to resign with a good grace all that you are not.
—Henri Frederic Amiel
Topics: Realistic Expectations, Expectations, Realization, Acceptance, Awareness

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.
—Henri Frederic Amiel
Topics: Belief

The man who has no inner life is a slave to his surroundings.
—Henri Frederic Amiel
Topics: Attitude

The man who insists upon seeing with perfect clearness before he decides, never decides. Accept life, and you must accept regret.
—Henri Frederic Amiel
Topics: Decisions, Regret, Acceptance, Perfect, Doubt, Perfection, Decision, Uncertainty, Learn, Decide

Man becomes man only by his intelligence, but he is man only by his heart.
—Henri Frederic Amiel
Topics: Instincts, Intelligence

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.
—Henri Frederic Amiel
Topics: Secrets

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.
—Henri Frederic Amiel
Topics: Things, Little Things

The test of every religious, political, or educational system is the man which it forms.
—Henri Frederic Amiel
Topics: Man

Order is a great person’s need and their true well being.
—Henri Frederic Amiel
Topics: Order

In every loving woman there is a priestess of the past—a pious guardian of some affection, of which the object has disappeared.
—Henri Frederic Amiel
Topics: Lovers, The Past

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.
—Henri Frederic Amiel
Topics: Music

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.
—Henri Frederic Amiel
Topics: Greatness & Great Things, Greatness

A family without government, says Matthew Henry, “is like a house without a roof, exposed to every wind that blows.”—He might better have said, like a house in flames, a scene of confusion, and commonly too hot to live in.
—Henri Frederic Amiel
Topics: Family

Great men are the real men, in them nature has succeeded.
—Henri Frederic Amiel
Topics: Greatness

True humility is contentment.
—Henri Frederic Amiel
Topics: Humility

In health there is freedom. Health is the first of all liberties.
—Henri Frederic Amiel
Topics: Health

Society lives by faith, and develops by science.
—Henri Frederic Amiel
Topics: Society

We must dare to be happy, and dare to confess it, regarding ourselves always as the depositories, not as the authors of our own joy.
—Henri Frederic Amiel

The best path through life is the highway.
—Henri Frederic Amiel

To marry unequally is to suffer equally.
—Henri Frederic Amiel
Topics: Marriage

Dreams are excursions into the limbo of things, a semi-deliverance from the human prison.
—Henri Frederic Amiel
Topics: Dreams