Top 180 Henri-Frédéric Amiel Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “Woman is the salvation or the destruction of the family. She carries its destiny in the folds of her mantle.”

— Henri-Frédéric Amiel

152. “Self-interest is an inexhaustible source of convenient illusions. The number of beings who wish to see truly is extraordinarily small.”

— Henri-Frédéric Amiel

153. “Latent genius is but a presumption. Everything that can be, is bound to come into being, and what never comes into being is nothing.”

— Henri-Frédéric Amiel

154. “To understand is to possess the thing understood, first by sympathy and then by intelligence.”

— Henri-Frédéric Amiel

155. “The philosopher aspires to explain away all mysteries, to dissolve them into light. Mystery, on the other hand, is demanded and pursued by the religious instinct; mystery constitutes the essence of worship.”

— Henri-Frédéric Amiel

156. “Common sense is the measure of the possible.”

— Henri-Frédéric Amiel

157. “Everything which is, is thought, but not conscious and individual thought. The human intelligence is but the consciousness of being. It is what I have formulated before: Everything is a symbol of a symbol, and a symbol of what? of mind.”

— Henri-Frédéric Amiel

158. “The ideal doctor would be a man endowed with profound knowledge of life and of the soul, intuitively divining any suffering or disorder of whatever kind, and restoring peace by his mere presence.”

— Henri-Frédéric Amiel

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

— Henri-Frédéric Amiel

160. “True poetry is truer than science, because it is synthetic, and seizes at once what the combination of all the sciences is able, at most, to attain as a final result.”

— Henri-Frédéric Amiel

161. “About Jesus we must believe no one but himself.”

— Henri-Frédéric Amiel

162. “Men don’t achieve truth because they lack humility and love of truth. They won’t criticize their own beliefs. Truth would overwhelm them.”

— Henri-Frédéric Amiel

163. “Thought is a kind of opium; it can intoxicate us, while still broad awake; it can make transparent the mountains and everything that exists.”

— Henri-Frédéric Amiel

164. “When everything is in its right place within us, we ourselves are in balance with the whole work of God.”

— Henri-Frédéric Amiel

165. “We become actors without realizing it, and actors without wanting to.”

— Henri-Frédéric Amiel

166. “The ideal, after all, is true than the real: for the ideal is the eternal element in perishable things.”

— Henri-Frédéric Amiel

167. “There is only one way of not hating those who do us wrong, and that is by doing them good.”

— Henri-Frédéric Amiel

168. “As it is impossible to be outside God, the best is consciously to dwell in Him.”

— Henri-Frédéric Amiel

169. “Nature does at least what she can to translate into visible form the wealth of the creative formula. By the vastness of the abysses into which she penetrates, in the effort – the unsuccessful effort – to house and contain the eternal thought, we may measure the greatness of the divine mind.”

— Henri-Frédéric Amiel

170. “Time is but the measure of the difficulty of a conception. Pure thought has scarcely any need of time, since it perceives the two ends of an idea almost at the same moment.”

— Henri-Frédéric Amiel

171. “Men of genius supply the substance of history, while the mass of men are but the critical filter, the limiting, slackening, passive force needed for the modification of ideas supplied by genius.”

— Henri-Frédéric Amiel

172. “The germs of all things are in every heart, and the greatest criminals as well as the greatest heroes are but different modes of ourselves.”

— Henri-Frédéric Amiel

173. “Every living being seeks instinctively to complete itself.”

— Henri-Frédéric Amiel

174. “Philosophy means the complete liberty of the mind.”

— Henri-Frédéric Amiel

175. “There are 2 sorts of pride: one in which we approve others, the other in which we cannot accept ourselves.”

— Henri-Frédéric Amiel

176. “A philosopher is aspires to explain away all mysteries, to dissolve them into light.”

— Henri-Frédéric Amiel

177. “The soul may be immortal because she is fitted to rise towards that which is neither born nor dies, towards that which exists substantially, necessarily, invariably, that is to say towards God.”

— Henri-Frédéric Amiel

178. “Mother of Marvels, mysterious and tender Nature, why do we not live more in thee.”

— Henri-Frédéric Amiel

179. “The musician of the present day, not being able to give us what is beautiful, torments himself to give us what is new.”

— Henri-Frédéric Amiel

180. “Man is a passion which brings a will into play, which works an intelligence.”

— Henri-Frédéric Amiel

181. “Be swift to love and make haste to be kind. Gladden others’ hearts.” .”

— Henri-Frédéric Amiel

182. “Happiness does away with ugliness, and even makes the beauty of beauty.”

— Henri-Frédéric Amiel

183. “Habits count for more than maxims, because habit is a living maxim, becomes flesh and instinct. To reform one’s maxims is nothing: it is but to change the title of the book.”

— Henri-Frédéric Amiel