Amiel's Journal: The Journal Intime of Henri-Frdric Amiel

"The great artist is the simplifier."

"Henri-Frédéric Amiel (1821-1881) - Amiel's Journal, 1849-1872, Mrs. Humphrey Ward, the translator of the 'Journal Intime of Henri-Frederic Amiel, has had it in her power to recommend the work to the English public with some influential critical testimonies of an enthusiastic character, proceeding from no less personages than M. Scherer, Mr. Renan, and Mark Pattison, the late Rector of Lincoln." -The Westminster Review, Volume 125, January, 1886

"In this mixture of the faith which clings and aspires, with the intellectual pliancy which allows the mind to sway freely under the pressure of life and experience, and the deep respect for truth, which will allow nothing to interfere between thought and its appointed tasks--that Amiel's special claim upon us lies. It is this balance of forces in him which makes him so widely representative of the modern mind--of its doubts, its convictions, its hopes. He speaks for the life of to-day as no other single voice has yet spoken for it; in his contradictions, his fears, his despairs, and yet in the constant straining toward the unseen and the ideal which gives a fundamental unity to his inner life, he is the type of a generation universally touched with doubt, and yet as sensitive to the need of faith as any that have gone before it; more widely conscious than its predecessors of the limitations of the human mind, and of the iron pressure of man's physical environment; but at the same time--paradox as it may seem--more conscious of man's greatness, more deeply thrilled by the spectacle of the nobility and beauty interwoven with the universe." -From the Introduction ""Do not amend by reasoning, but by example; approach feeling by feeling; do not hope to excite love except by love."

"Reality, the present, the irreparable, the necessary, repel and even terrify me. I have too much imagination, conscience, and penetration and not enough character. The life of thought alone seems to me to have enough elasticity and immensity, to be free enough from the irreparable; practical life makes me afraid. I am distrustful of myself and of happiness because I know myself. The ideal poisons for me all imperfect possession. And I abhor useless regrets and repentance."