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Henri-Frédéric Amiel Quotes

1821–1881 Switzerland

Henri-Frédéric Amiel (27 September 1821 – 11 May 1881) was a Swiss moral philosopher, poet, and critic.

Switzerland
Philosophers
Poets

Also known as: Henri Frederic Amiel, Henri Frédéric Amiel, Henri-Frederic Amiel

Random Henri-Frédéric Amiel quote

61 quotes

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

Journal Intime (1882)

Knowledge, love, power,—there is the complete life.

Journal Intime (1882)

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

Journal Intime (1882)

The man who has no inner life is the slave of his surroundings.

Journal Intime (1882)

Women wish to be loved without a why or a wherefore; not because they are pretty, or good, or well-bred, or graceful, or intelligent, but because they are themselves.

Journal Intime (1882)

Sympathy is a first condition of criticism; reason and justice presuppose, at their origin, emotion.

Journal Intime (1882)

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

Journal Intime (1882)

Dreams are excursions into the limbo of things, a semi-deliverance from the human prison.

Journal Intime (1882)

An error is the more dangerous in proportion to the degree of truth which it contains.

Journal Intime (1882)

Man becomes man only by the intelligence, but he is man only by the heart.

Journal Intime (1882)

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

Journal Intime (1882)

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

Journal Intime (1882)

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

Journal Intime (1882)

Wisdom consists in rising superior both to madness and to common sense, and in lending one’s self to the universal delusion without becoming its dupe.

Journal Intime (1882)

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

Journal Intime (1882)

Spite is anger which is afraid to show itself, it is an impotent fury conscious of its impotence.

Journal Intime (1882)

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

Journal Intime (1882)

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

Journal Intime (1882)

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

Journal Intime (1882)

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.

Journal Intime (1882)

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Henri-Frédéric Amiel (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.