Henri-Frédéric Amiel citations (53 citations, Page 2)

Henri-Frédéric Amiel: 53 citations0 J'aime

Henri-Frédéric Amiel citations célèbres

“Mille choses avancent, neuf cent quatre-vingt dix-huit reculent; c’est là le progrès.”

Journal intime

“La bêtise aura toujours l’avantage du nombre.”

Journal intime

“Une erreur est d’autant plus dangereuse qu’elle contient plus de vérité. Le sophisme est plus vrai que l’absurdité; aussi l’absurdité est-elle innocente et le sophisme redoutable.”

Henri-Frédéric Amiel

Grains de mil, 1854

Henri-Frédéric Amiel: Citations en anglais

“Life is the apprenticeship to progressive renunciation, to the steady diminution of our claims, of our hopes, of our powers, of our liberty.”

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Henri-Frédéric Amiel

Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919), Journal

“There is but one thing needful — to possess God. All our senses, all our powers of mind and soul, all our external resources, are so many ways of approaching the divinity, so many modes of tasting and of adoring God. We must learn to detach ourselves from all that is capable of being lost, to bind ourselves absolutely only to what is absolute and eternal, and to enjoy the rest as a loan, as a usufruct…. To worship, to comprehend, to receive, to feel, to give, to act: this our law, our duty, our happiness, our heaven.”

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Henri-Frédéric Amiel

16 July 1848
Only one thing is necessary: to possess God — All the senses, all the forces of the soul and of the spirit, all the exterior resources are so many open outlets to the Divinity; so many ways of tasting and of adoring God. We should be able to detach ourselves from all that is perishable and cling absolutely to the eternal and the absolute and enjoy the all else as a loan, as a usufruct…. To worship, to comprehend, to receive, to feel, to give, to act: this our law, our duty, our happiness, our heaven.
As translated in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)
Journal Intime (1882), Journal entries

“If ignorance and passion are the foes of popular morality, it must be confessed that moral indifference is the malady of the cultivated classes. The modern separation of enlightenment and virtue, of thought and conscience, of the intellectual aristocracy from the honest and common crowd is the greatest danger that can threaten liberty.”

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Henri-Frédéric Amiel

Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919), Journal

“[There still remains the question whether] he who discovers a new world in the depths of the invisible would not do wisely to plant on it a flag known to himself alone, and, like Achilles, "devour his heart in secret;" whether the greatest problems which have ever been guessed on earth had not better have remained buried in the brain which had found the key to them, and whether the deepest thinkers — those whose hand has been boldest in drawing aside the veil, and their eye keenest in fathoming the mysteries beyond it — had not better, like the prophetess of Ilion, have kept for heaven, and heaven only, secrets and mysteries which human tongue cannot truly express, nor human intelligence conceive.”

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Henri-Frédéric Amiel

Review of L'Art Chrétien by Alexis-François Rio in the Bibliothèque Universelle de Genève. (1842)
Journal Intime (1882), Quotes used in the Introduction by Ward

“Put personal ambition away from you, and then you will find consolation in living or in dying, whatever may happen to you.”

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Henri-Frédéric Amiel

3 May 1849
Journal Intime (1882), Journal entries

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

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Henri-Frédéric Amiel

Variant translation: To shun one's cross is to make it heavier.
Journal Intime (1882), Journal entries

“This morning the music of a brass band which had stopped under my windows moved me almost to tears. It exercised an indefinable, nostalgic power over me; it set me dreaming of another world, of infinite passion and supreme happiness. Such impressions are the echoes of Paradise in the soul; memories of ideal spheres whose sad sweetness ravishes and intoxicates the heart. O Plato! O Pythagoras! ages ago you heard these harmonies, surprised these moments of inward ecstasy, — knew these divine transports! If music thus carries us to heaven, it is because music is harmony, harmony is perfection, perfection is our dream, and our dream is heaven.”

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Henri-Frédéric Amiel

17 March 1870
Source: Journal Intime (1882), Journal entries

“Doing easily what others find difficult is talent; doing what is impossible for talent is genius.”

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Henri-Frédéric Amiel

Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919), Journal

“It gives liberty and breadth to thought, to learn to judge our own epoch from the point of view of universal history, history from the point of view of geological periods, geology from the point of view of astronomy.”

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Henri-Frédéric Amiel

20 July 1848
Journal Intime (1882), Journal entries

“Liberty, equality — bad principles! The only true principle for humanity is justice; and justice to the feeble becomes necessarily protection or kindness.”

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Henri-Frédéric Amiel

Undated entry of December 1863 or early 1864, as translated by Humphry Ward (1893), p. 215
Journal Intime (1882), Journal entries

“At bottom there is but one subject of study: the forms and metamorphoses of mind. All other subjects may be reduced to that; all other studies bring us back to this study.”

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Henri-Frédéric Amiel

20 July 1848
Journal Intime (1882), Journal entries

“To be misunderstood even by those whom one loves is the cross and bitterness of life. It is the secret of that sad and melancholy smile on the lips of great men which so few understand; it is the cruelest trial reserved for self-devotion; it is what must have oftenest wrung the heart of the Son of man; and if God could suffer, it would be the wound we should be forever inflicting upon Him. He also — He above all — is the great misunderstood, the least comprehended.”

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Henri-Frédéric Amiel

27 May 1849
Journal Intime (1882), Journal entries

“Truth is the secret of eloquence and of virtue, the basis of moral authority; it is the highest summit of art and of life.”

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Henri-Frédéric Amiel

Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919), Journal

“The spirit of sarcasm lives and thrives in the midst of universal wreck; its balls are enchanted and itself invulnerable, and it braves retaliations and reprisals because itself is a mere flash, a bodiless and magical nothing.”

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Henri-Frédéric Amiel

16 February 1868
Journal Intime (1882), Journal entries

“I have never felt any inward assurance of genius, or any presentiment of glory or of happiness. I have never seen myself in imagination great or famous, or even a husband, a father, an influential citizen. This indifference to the future, this absolute self-distrust, are, no doubt, to be taken as signs. What dreams I have are all vague and indefinite; I ought not to live, for I am now scarcely capable of living.”

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Henri-Frédéric Amiel

3 May 1849
Journal Intime (1882), Journal entries

“There is a great affinity in me with the Hindu genius - that mind, vast, imaginative, loving, dreamy and speculative, but destitute of ambition, personality and will. Pantheistic disinterestedness, the effacement of the self in the great whole, womanish gentleness, a horror of slaughter, antipathy to action - these are all present in my nature, in the nature at least which has been developed by years and circumstances. Still the West has also its part in me. What I have found difficult to keep up a prejudice in favor of my form, nationality or individuality whatever. Hence my indifference to my own person, my own usefulness, interest or opinions of the moment. What does it all matter? It is not perhaps not a bad thing,' he says, 'that in the midst of the devouring activities of the Western world there should be a few Brahmanical souls.”

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Henri-Frédéric Amiel

Source: Amie1, Henri Frederic Amie! s journal: The Journal intime of Henri-Frederic Amie! p. 159 161,224. and 269.
Quoted in Londhe, S. (2008). A tribute to Hinduism: Thoughts and wisdom spanning continents and time about India and her culture. New Delhi: Pragun Publication.

“Almost everything comes from nothing.”

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Henri-Frédéric Amiel

“So long as a person is capable of self-renewal they are a living being.”

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Henri-Frédéric Amiel

“Work while you have the light. You are responsible for the talent that has been entrusted to you.”

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Henri-Frédéric Amiel

“Society lives by faith, develops by reason.”

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Henri-Frédéric Amiel