Henri Frederic Amiel Quotes - Page 7

To win true peace, a man needs to feel himself directed, pardoned, and sustained by a supreme power, to feel himself in the right road, at the point where God would have him be - in order with God and the universe. This faith gives strength and calm.

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

Life alone can rekindle life.

Nothing resembles pride so much as discouragement.

The efficacy of religion lies precisely in what is not rational, philosophic, nor eternal; its efficacy lies in the unforeseen, the miraculous, the extraordinary. Thus religion attracts more devotion according as it demands more faith - that is to say, as it becomes more incredible to the profane mind.

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, the power of proselytism.

In order to see Christianity, one must forget all the Christians.

Action and faith enslave thought, both of them in order not be troubled or inconvenienced by reflection, criticism, and doubt.

We are always making God our accomplice, that so we may legalize our own iniquities. Every successful massacre is consecrated by a Te Deum, and the clergy have never been wanting in benedictions for any victorious enormity.

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

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

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

Common sense is calculation applied to life.

To depersonalize man is the dominant drift of our times.

In every loving woman there is a priestess of the past - a pious guardian of some affection, of which the object has disappeared.

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

Oh be swift to live, make haste to be kind.

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

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

Emancipation from error is the condition of real knowledge.

He who is too much afraid of being duped has lost the power of being magnanimous.

Pure truth cannot be assimilated by the crowd; it must be communicated by contagion.

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.

At the bottom of the modern man there is always a great thirst for self-forgetfulness, self-distraction . . . and therefore he turns away from all those problems and abysses which might recall to him his own nothingness.

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.