Amiel's Journal: The Journal Intime of Henri-Frédéric Amiel, Volume 2 |
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Common terms and phrases
absolute adore æsthetic Aletsch glacier Amiel Atheism beauty become believe Brahma charm Christianity Church civilisation conscience consciousness critic death desire destiny divine doubt dream duty eternal Eumenides everything evil existence faith fantastic light February feel force France French Geneva give Goethe happiness harmony heart holiness hope human Hyères idea ideal illusion imagination impersonal indifference individual infinite instinct intellectual justice kind labour legal fiction Liberal Christianity liberty living Madame Necker madness matter means melancholy mind Molière monad moral mystery nature ness never once one's oneself ourselves pain passion peace perfection perhaps philosophy poetry possible principle Protestantism pure race realise reality recognise religion religious Sainte-Beuve Scheveningen Schopenhauer seems sense soul speak spirit Stoicism suffering taste things thought tion true truth understand universal Victor Hugo vidual virtue whole WILLIAM WINTER wisdom word
Popular passages
Page 64 - there is more joy in heaven over one sinner that repenteth, than over ninety and nine just persons that need no repentance.
Page 359 - The courses of nature, and the prodigious injustices of man in society, affect him with neither horror nor awe. He will see no monster if he can help it.
Page 243 - I cannot bring myself to sympathise with such a way of understanding poetry. The talent shown is astonishing, but stuff and matter are wanting. It is an effort of the imagination to stand alone — a substitute for everything else. We find metaphors, rhymes, music, colour, but not man, not humanity.
Page 315 - ... state, the state of point, of potentiality, of pregnant nothingness. Is not this the true definition of mind ? is not mind, dissociated from space and time, just this ? Its development, past or future, is contained in it just as a curve is contained in its algebraical formula. This nothing is an all. This punctum without dimensions is a punctum saliens.
Page 117 - The mind must have for ballast the clear conception of duty, if it is not to fluctuate between levity and despair. Before giving advice we must have secured its acceptance, or rather, have made it desired. If we begin by overrating the being we love, we shall end by treating it with wholesale injustice. It is dangerous to abandon oneself to the luxury of grief ; it deprives one of courage, and even of the wish for recovery.
Page 71 - foolishness " of the cross, it took possession of the masses. And in our own day, those who wish to get rid of the supernatural, to enlighten religion, to economize faith, find themselves deserted, like poets who should declaim against poetry, or women who should decry love. Faith consists in the acceptance of the incomprehensible, and even in the pursuit of the impossible, and is self-intoxicated with its own sacrifices, its own repeated extravagances.
Page 225 - I have been again looking through Victor Hugo's 'Paris' (1867). For ten years event after event has given the lie to the prophet, but the confidence of the prophet in his own imaginings is not therefore a whit diminished. Humility and common sense are only fit for Lilliputians.
Page 98 - In society people are expected to behave as if they lived on ambrosia and concerned themselves with no interests but such as are noble. Care, need, passion, do not exist. All realism is suppressed as brutal. In a word, what is called le grand monde gives itself for the moment the flattering illusion that it is moving in an ethereal atmosphere and breathing the air of the gods.
Page 158 - In youth the tone of these ^iolian vibrations of the heart is all hope — a proof that these thousands of indistinguishable accents make up indeed the fundamental note of our being, and reveal the tone of our whole situation. Tell me what you feel in your solitary room when the full moon is shining in upon you and your lamp is dying out, and I will tell you how old you are, and I shall know if you are happy.