Henri Frederic Amiel Self Quotations

Tears are the symbol of the inability of the soul to restrain its emotion and retain its self command.

Self-interest is but the survival of the animal in us. Humanity only begins for man with self-surrender.

Order means light and peace, inward liberty and free command over one's self; order is power.

Obstinacy is will asserting itself without being able to justify itself. It is persistence without a reasonable motive. It is the tenacity of self-love substituted for that of reason and conscience.

It is dangerous to abandon one's self to the luxury of grief; it deprives one of courage, and even of the wish for recovery.

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.

Self-interest is an inexhaustible source of convenient illusions. The number of beings who wish to see truly is extraordinarily small.

Let mystery have its place in you ; do not be always turning up your whole soil with the ploughshare of self-examination, but leave a little fallow corner in your heart ready for any seed the winds may bring ...

So long as a person is capable of self-renewal they are a living being. -Henri