Top 180 Henri-Frédéric Amiel Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “Life alone can rekindle life.”

— Henri-Frédéric Amiel

52. “Kindness is gladdening the hearts of those who are traveling the dark journey with us.”

— Henri-Frédéric Amiel

53. “Emancipation from error is the condition of real knowledge.”

— Henri-Frédéric Amiel

54. “If ignorance and passion are the foes of popular morality, it must be confessed that moral indifference is the malady of the cultivated classes.”

— Henri-Frédéric Amiel

55. “The mind must have for ballast the clear conception of duty, if it is not to fluctuate between levity and despair.”

— Henri-Frédéric Amiel

56. “What we call little things are merely the causes of great things.”

— Henri-Frédéric Amiel

57. “The masses are the material of democracy, but its form-that is to say, the laws which express the general reason, justice, and utility-can only be rightly shaped by wisdom, which is by no means a universal property.”

— Henri-Frédéric Amiel

58. “Happiness has no limits, because God has neither bottom nor bounds, and because happiness is nothing but the conquest of God through love.”

— Henri-Frédéric Amiel

59. “Our greatest illusion is to believe that we are what we think ourselves to be.”

— Henri-Frédéric Amiel

60. “Sympathy is the first condition of criticism; reason and justice presuppose, at their origin, emotion.”

— Henri-Frédéric Amiel

61. “Order means light and peace, inward liberty and free command over one’s self; order is power.”

— Henri-Frédéric Amiel

62. “Blessed be childhood, which brings down something of heaven into the midst of our rough earthliness.”

— Henri-Frédéric Amiel

63. “Never to tire, never to grow cold; to be patient, sympathetic, tender; to look for the budding flower and the opening heart; to hope always; like God, to love always – this is duty.”

— Henri-Frédéric Amiel

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

— Henri-Frédéric Amiel

65. “Love is like swallowing hot chocolate before it has cooled off. It takes you by surprise at first, but keeps you warm for a long time.”

— Henri-Frédéric Amiel

66. “Criticism is above all a gift, an intuition, a matter of tact and flair; it cannot be taught or demonstrated – it is an art.”

— Henri-Frédéric Amiel

67. “We are never more discontented with others than when we are discontented with ourselves. The consciousness of wrong-doing makes us irritable, and our heart, in its cunning, quarrels with what is outside it, in order that it may deafen the clamor within.”

— Henri-Frédéric Amiel

68. “Nothing is more characteristic of a man than the manner in which he behaves toward fools.”

— Henri-Frédéric Amiel

69. “Happiness gives us the energy which is the basis of health.”

— Henri-Frédéric Amiel

70. “Man becomes man only by his intelligence, but he is man only by his heart.”

— Henri-Frédéric Amiel

71. “Religion is not a method, it is a life, a higher and supernatural life, mystical in its root and practical in its fruits; a communion with God, a calm and deep enthusiasm, a love which radiates, a force which acts, a happiness which overflows.”

— Henri-Frédéric Amiel

72. “Man never knows what he wants; he aspires to penetrate mysteries and as soon as he has, wants to re-establish them. Ignorance irritates him and knowledge cloys.”

— Henri-Frédéric Amiel

73. “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.”

— Henri-Frédéric Amiel

74. “Conquering any difficulty always gives one a secret joy, for it means pushing back a boundary-line and adding to one’s liberty.”

— Henri-Frédéric Amiel

75. “Time is the supreme illusion. It is but the inner prism by which we decompose being and life, the mode under which we perceive successively what is simultaneous in idea.”

— Henri-Frédéric Amiel

76. “We are always making God our accomplice, that so we may legalize our own iniquities. Every successful massacre is consecrated by a Te Deum, and the clergy have never been wanting in benedictions for any victorious enormity.”

— Henri-Frédéric Amiel

77. “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 gangrene, of a storm, of a revolution.”

— Henri-Frédéric Amiel

78. “What we do not understand we have no right to judge.”

— Henri-Frédéric Amiel

79. “Hope is only the love of life.”

— Henri-Frédéric Amiel

80. “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-Frédéric Amiel

81. “If nationality is consent, the state is compulsion.”

— Henri-Frédéric Amiel

82. “A thousand things advance; nine hundred and ninety nine retreat; That is progress.”

— Henri-Frédéric Amiel

83. “To be always ready a man must be able to cut a knot, for everything cannot be untied.”

— Henri-Frédéric Amiel

84. “There is no curing a sick man who believes himself to be in health.”

— Henri-Frédéric Amiel

85. “To know how to suggest is the art of teaching.”

— Henri-Frédéric Amiel

86. “Society rests upon conscience, not upon science.”

— Henri-Frédéric Amiel

87. “Our life is nothing, it is true, but our life is divine. A breath of nature annihilates us, but we surpass nature in penetrating far beyond her vast phantasmagoria to the changeless and the eternal.”

— Henri-Frédéric Amiel

88. “Love is faith and one faith leads to another.”

— Henri-Frédéric Amiel

89. “Our dependence outweighs our independence, for we are independent only in our desire, while we are dependent on our health, on nature, on society, on everything in us and outside us.”

— Henri-Frédéric Amiel

90. “Let the living live; and you, gather together your thoughts, leave behind you a legacy of feeling and ideas; you will be most useful so.”

— Henri-Frédéric Amiel

91. “To win true peace, a man needs to feel himself directed, pardoned, and sustained by a supreme power, to feel himself in the right road, at the point where God would have him be – in order with God and the universe. This faith gives strength and calm.”

— Henri-Frédéric Amiel

92. “The unfinished is nothing.”

— Henri-Frédéric Amiel

93. “The art which is grand and yet simple is that which presupposes the greatest elevation both in artist and in public.”

— Henri-Frédéric Amiel

94. “The fire which enlightens is the same fire which consumes.”

— Henri-Frédéric Amiel

95. “The tragic solemnity of existence strikes us with terrible force on that morning when we wake to find the mournful words “too late” ringing in our ears.”

— Henri-Frédéric Amiel

96. “A modest garden contains, for those who know how to look and to wait, more instruction than a library.”

— Henri-Frédéric Amiel

97. “How, then, find the courage for action? By slipping a little into unconsciousness, spontaneity, instinct which holds one to the earth and dictates the relatively good and useful. By accepting the human condition more simply, and candidly, by dreading troubles less, calculating less, hoping more.”

— Henri-Frédéric Amiel

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

— Henri-Frédéric Amiel

99. “Philosophy starts with doubt and loves only truth.”

— Henri-Frédéric Amiel

100. “The history of man is essentially zoological; it becomes human late in the day, and then only in the beautiful souls, the souls alive to justice, goodness, enthusiasm, and devotion. The angel shows itself rarely and with difficulty through the highly-organized brute.”

— Henri-Frédéric Amiel