Quotes from Henri Frederic Amiel

Music is harmony, harmony is perfection, perfection is our dream, and our dream is heaven.

Materialism coarsens and petrifies everything, making everything vulgar, and every truth false.

Sacrifice still exists everywhere, and everywhere the elect of each generation suffers for the salvation of the rest.

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

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

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

The more a man loves, the more he suffers. The sum of possible grief for each soul is in proportion to its degree of perfection.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

Woman is the salvation or the destruction of the family. She carries its destiny in the folds of her mantle.

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

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

Analysis kills spontaneity.

A belief is not true simply because it is useful.

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

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

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.

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

Sacrifice, which is the passion of great souls, has never been the law of societies.

Order is a great person's need and their true well being.