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

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Macmillan and Company, 1885 - Authors, Swiss - 487 pages

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Page 269 - there is more joy in heaven over one sinner that repenteth, than over ninety and nine just persons that need no repentance.
Page 2 - Christianity is above all religious, and religion is not a method, it is a life, a higher and supernatural life, mystical in its root and practical in its fruits, a communion with God, a calm and deep enthusiasm, a love which radiates, a force which acts, a happiness which overflows.
Page xlvii - To the old paths, my soul ! Oh, be it so ! I bear the workday burden of dull life About these footsore flags of a weary world, Heaven knows how long it has not been ; at once, Lo ! I am in the spirit on the Lord's day With John in Patmos. Is it not enough, One day in seven? and if this should go, If this pure solace should desert my mind, What were all else? I dare not risk this loss. To the old paths, my soul ! Sp.
Page 18 - 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.
Page 290 - It is in the novel that the average vulgarity of German society, and its inferiority to the societies of France and England are most clearly visible. The notion of a thing's jarring on the taste is wanting to German aesthetics.
Page 71 - Do not despise your situation ; in it you must act, suffer, and conquer. From every point on earth we are equally near to heaven and to the infinite. There are two states or conditions of pride. The first is one of self-approval, the second one of self-contempt. Pride is seen probably at its purest in the last. It is by teaching that we teach ourselves, by relating that we observe, by affirming that we examine, by showing that we look, by writing that we think, by pumping that we draw water into...
Page 274 - At bottom, everything depends upon the presence or absence of one single element in the soul — hope. All the activity of man, all his efforts and all his enterprises, presuppose a hope in him of attaining an end. Once kill this hope and his movements become senseless, spasmodic, and convulsive, like those of some one falling from a height.
Page 427 - They are eager for gold, for power, for dominion; their aim is to crush men and to enslave nature. They show an obstinate interest in means, and have not a thought for the end. They confound being with individual being, and the expansion of the self with happiness — that is to say, they do not live by the soul; they ignore the unchangeable and the eternal; they live at the periphery of their being, because they are unable to penetrate to its axis. They are excited, ardent, positive, because they...
Page 25 - The statistician will register a growing progress, and the moralist a gradual decline: on the one hand, a progress of things; on the other, a decline of souls. The useful will take the place of the beautiful, industry of art, political economy of religion, and arithmetic of poetry.

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