Quotes from Henri Frederic Amiel

Tears are the symbol of the inability of the soul to restrain its emotion and retain its self command.

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.

Society rests upon conscience, not upon science.

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

The best path through life is the highway.

He who asks of life nothing but the improvement of his own nature... is less liable than anyone else to miss and waste life.

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.

Accept life, and you must accept regret.

The fire which enlightens is the same fire which consumes.

Our systems, perhaps, are nothing more than an unconscious apology for our faults, a gigantic scaffolding whose object is to hide from us our favorite sin.

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

Common sense is calculation applied to life.

To learn new habits is everything, for it is to reach the substance of life. Life is but a tissue of habits.

Every situation is an equilibrium of forces; every life is a struggle between opposing forces working within the limits of a certain equilibrium

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.

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

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

There is no respect for others without humility in one's self.

Time is but the space between our memories; as soon as we cease to perceive this space, time has disappeared.

Time and space are fragments of the infinite for the use of finite creatures.

Almost everything comes from almost nothing.

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.

Every life is a profession of faith.

Life alone can rekindle life.