Top 180 Henri-Frédéric Amiel Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “Each man enters into God so much as God enters into him.”

— Henri-Frédéric Amiel

102. “Righteous ends, thus approved, absolve of guilt the most violent means.”

— Henri-Frédéric Amiel

103. “Each bud flowers but once and each flower has but its minute of perfect beauty; so, in the garden of the soul each feeling has, as it were, its flowering instant, its one and only moment of expansive grace and radiant kingship.”

— Henri-Frédéric Amiel

104. “To depersonalize man is the dominant drift of our times.”

— Henri-Frédéric Amiel

105. “Common sense is the measure of the possible; it is composed of experience and prevision; it is calculation applied to life.”

— Henri-Frédéric Amiel

106. “Doubt of the reality of love ends by making us doubt everything.”

— Henri-Frédéric Amiel

107. “We are never more discontented with others than when we are discontented with ourselves.”

— Henri-Frédéric Amiel

108. “Doubt is the accomplice of tyranny.”

— Henri-Frédéric Amiel

109. “If man was what he ought to be, he would be adored by the animals...”

— Henri-Frédéric Amiel

110. “For purposes of action nothing is more useful than narrowness of thought combined with energy of will.”

— Henri-Frédéric Amiel

111. “To live we must conquer incessantly, we must have the courage to be happy.”

— Henri-Frédéric Amiel

112. “Wisdom consists in rising superior both to madness and to common sense, and is lending oneself to the universal illusion without becoming its dupe.”

— Henri-Frédéric Amiel

113. “A microscopic phantom of the universe; this is all that we are able to be.”

— Henri-Frédéric Amiel

114. “In every loving woman there is a priestess of the past.”

— Henri-Frédéric Amiel

115. “There is no repose for the mind except in the absolute; for feeling, except in the infinite; for the soul, except in the divine.”

— Henri-Frédéric Amiel

116. “Music is harmony, harmony is perfection, perfection is our dream, and our dream is heaven.”

— Henri-Frédéric Amiel

117. “Order is man’s greatest need, and his true well-being.”

— Henri-Frédéric Amiel

118. “Nothing finite is true, is interesting, is worthy to fix my attention. All that is particular is exclusive, and all that is exclusive repels me.”

— Henri-Frédéric Amiel

119. “At bottom, everything depends upon the presence or absence of one single element in the soul – HOPE.”

— Henri-Frédéric Amiel

120. “The laws of animality govern almost the whole of history.”

— Henri-Frédéric Amiel

121. “It is work which gives flavor to life.”

— Henri-Frédéric Amiel

122. “To do what is impossible for talent is the mark of genius.”

— Henri-Frédéric Amiel

123. “It is by teaching that we teach ourselves.”

— Henri-Frédéric Amiel

124. “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.”

— Henri-Frédéric Amiel

125. “It is dangerous to abandon one’s self to the luxury of grief; it deprives one of courage, and even of the wish for recovery.”

— Henri-Frédéric Amiel

126. “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-Frédéric Amiel

127. “Whenever conscience speaks with a divided, uncertain, and disputed voice, it is not the voice of God. Descend still deeper into yourself, until you hear nothing but a clear, undivided voice, a voice which does away with doubt and brings with it persuasion, light, and serenity.”

— Henri-Frédéric Amiel

128. “We are always making God our accomplice so that we may legalize our own inequities.”

— Henri-Frédéric Amiel

129. “Peace is not in itself a dream, but we know it only as the result of a momentary equilibrium – an accident.”

— Henri-Frédéric Amiel

130. “Joy is the vital air of the soul.”

— Henri-Frédéric Amiel

131. “The test of every religious, political, or educational system, is the man which it forms. If a system injures the intelligence it is bad. If it injures the character it is vicious. If it injures the conscience it is criminal.”

— Henri-Frédéric Amiel

132. “Accept life, and you must accept regret.”

— Henri-Frédéric Amiel

133. “I am a spectator, so to speak, of the molecular whirlwind which men call individual life; I am conscious of an incessant metamorphosis, an irresistible movement of existence, which is going on within me – and this phenomenology of myself serves as a window opened upon the mystery of the world.”

— Henri-Frédéric Amiel

134. “Before giving advice we must have secured its acceptance, or, rather, have made it desired.”

— Henri-Frédéric Amiel

135. “Men prefer the false due to habit, passion, will. Preference for truth is rare. Men are ruled by their fear of truth.”

— Henri-Frédéric Amiel

136. “Man is saved by love and duty, and by the hope that springs from duty, or rather from the moral facts of consciousness, as a flower springs from the soil.”

— Henri-Frédéric Amiel

137. “He who is too much afraid of being duped has lost the power of being magnanimous.”

— Henri-Frédéric Amiel

138. “Sadness takes up the pen more readily than joy.”

— Henri-Frédéric Amiel

139. “Nothing resembles pride so much as discouragement.”

— Henri-Frédéric Amiel

140. “Only evil grows of itself, while for goodness we want effort and courage.”

— Henri-Frédéric Amiel

141. “Before crime is committed conscience must be corrupted, and every bad man who succeeds in reaching a high point of wickedness begins with this.”

— Henri-Frédéric Amiel

142. “Life is an apprenticeship to the constant renunciations, to the steady failure of our claims, our hopes, our powers, our liberty.”

— Henri-Frédéric Amiel

143. “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.”

— Henri-Frédéric Amiel

144. “A musical theme once exhausted, finds its due refuge and repose in silence.”

— Henri-Frédéric Amiel

145. “It would have been a joy to me to be smiled upon, loved, encouraged, welcomed, and to obtain what I was so ready to give, kindness and goodwill. But to hunt down consideration and reputation – to force the esteem of others – seemed to me an effort unworthy of myself, almost a degradation.”

— Henri-Frédéric Amiel

146. “How true it is that our destinies are decided by nothings and that a small imprudence helped by some insignificant accident, as an acorn is fertilized by a drop of rain, may raise the trees on which perhaps we and others shall be crucified.”

— Henri-Frédéric Amiel

147. “In order to see Christianity, one must forget all the Christians.”

— Henri-Frédéric Amiel

148. “To feel keenly the poetry of a morning’s roses, one has to have just escaped from the claws of this vulture which we call sickness.”

— Henri-Frédéric Amiel

149. “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.”

— Henri-Frédéric Amiel

150. “The immense majority of our species are candidates for humanity, and nothing more.”

— Henri-Frédéric Amiel