Quotes from Henri Frederic Amiel

The great artist and thinker are the simplifiers.

War is a brutal and fierce means of pacification; it means the suppression of resistance by the destruction or enslavement of the conquered.

I do not deny the rights of democracy, but I have no illusions as to the uses that will be made of those rights so long as wisdom is rare and pride abundant

Any landscape is a condition of the spirit.

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

To be always ready a man must be able to cut a knot, for everything cannot be untied.

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.

If nationality is consent, the state is compulsion.

The object of true art is to charm the imagintion...

Action is coarsened thought; thought becomes concrete, obscure, and unconscious.

The test of every religious, political, or educational system is the man that it forms.

The man who insists upon seeing with perfect clearness before he decides, never decides. Accept life, and you must accept regret.

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.

Every man is a priest, even involuntarily; his conduct is an unspoken sermon, which is forever preaching to others.

There is no curing a sick man who believes himself to be in health.

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

What governs men is the fear of truth.

Man never knows what he wants; he aspires to penetrate mysteries and as soon as he has, wants to re-establish them. Ignorance irritates him and knowledge cloys.

It is not what he had, or even what he does which expresses the worth of a man, but what he is.

Each man enters into God so much as God enters into him.

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.

Learn to limit yourself; to content yourself with some definite work; dare to be what you are and learn to resign with a good grace all that you are not; and to believe in your own individuality.

It is work which gives flavor to life.

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