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

The gentleman, then, is the man who is master of himself, who respects himself, and makes others respect him. The essence of gentlemanliness is self-rule, the sovereignty of the...

But what astonishing philological and literary power has Victor Hugo! He is master of all the dialects contained in our language, dialects of the courts of law, of the stock-exc...

October 27, 1864. (_Promenade de la Treille_).--The air this morning was so perfectly clear and lucid that one might have distinguished a figure on the Vouache. [Footnote: The V...

To renounce happiness and think only of duty, to put conscience in the place of feeling--this voluntary martyrdom has its nobility. The natural man in us flinches, but the bette...

I still incline to believe that nature is the virtuality of mind--that the soul is the fruit of life, and liberty the flower of necessity--that all is bound together, and that n...

Does not all this make up a melancholy lot, a barren failure of a life? What use have I made of my gifts, of my special circumstances, of my half-century of existence? What have...

Is happiness anything more than a conventional fiction? The deepest reason for my state of doubt is that the supreme end and aim of life seems to me a mere lure and deception. T...

As the floor of valleys is raised by the denudation and washing down of the mountains, what is average will rise at the expense of what is great. The exceptional will disappear....

Thus Doudan scarcely ever speaks out his thought directly; he disguises and suggests it by imagery, allusion, hyperbole; he overlays it with light irony and feigned anger, with...

I hear the drops of my life falling distinctly one by one into the devouring abyss of eternity. I feel my days flying before the pursuit of death. All that remains to me of week...

_Same day_.--A new spirit governs and inspires the generation which will succeed me. It is a singular sensation to feel the grass growing under one’s feet, to see one’s self int...

It represents perhaps the oscillation between the two geniuses, the Greek and the Roman, the eastern and the western, the ancient and the Christian, or the struggle between the...

I love to plunge deep into the ocean of life; but it is not without losing sometimes all sense of the axis and the pole, without losing myself and feeling the consciousness of m...

May 19, 1880.--_Inadaptibility_, due either to mysticism or stiffness, delicacy or disdain, is the misfortune or at all events the characteristic of my life. I have not been abl...

September 24, 1857.--In the course of much thought yesterday about “Atala” and “René,” Châteaubriand became clear to me. I saw in him a great artist but not a great man, immense...

... I have just been looking through the complete works of Montesquieu, and cannot yet make plain to myself the impression left on me by this singular style, with its mixture of...

The puerility of the freethinkers consists in believing that a free society can maintain itself and keep itself together without a common faith, without a religious prejudice of...

November 16, 1870.--We are struck by something bewildering and ineffable when we look down into the depths of an abyss; and every soul is an abyss, a mystery of love and piety....

Having early a glimpse of the absolute, I have never had the indiscreet effrontery of individualism. What right have I to make a merit of a defect? I have never been able to see...

No--there is much more in the “Journal Intime” than the imagination or the poetical glow which Amiel shares with his immediate predecessors in the art of confession-writing. His...

April 17, 1860.--The cloud has lifted; I am better. I have been able to take my usual walk on the Treille; all the buds were opening and the young shoots were green on all the b...

In this second edition of the English translation of Amiel’s “Journal Intime,” I have inserted a good many new passages, taken from the last French edition (_Cinquiéme édition,...

_Later_.--Still re-reading the sonnets and the miscellaneous poems of Goethe. The impression left by this part of the “Gedichte” is much more favorable than that made upon me by...

Thus after a season of tears a sober and softened joy may return to us. Say to yourself that you are entering upon the autumn of your life; that the graces of spring and the spl...

Man is the _sensorium commune_ of nature, the point at which all values are interchanged. Mind is the plastic medium, the principle, and the result of all; at once material and...

Still one may no doubt easily exaggerate this loneliness of Amiel’s. His social difficulties represent rather a dull discomfort in his life, which in course of time, and in comb...

August 8, 1865. (_Gryon sur Bex_).--Splendid moonlight without a cloud. The night is solemn and majestic. The regiment of giants sleeps while the stars keep sentinel. In the vas...

May 23, 1855.--Every hurtful passion draws us to it, as an abyss does, by a kind of vertigo. Feebleness of will brings about weakness of head, and the abyss in spite of its horr...

June 4, 1877.--I have just heard the “Romeo and Juliet” of Hector Berlioz. The work is entitled “Dramatic symphony for orchestra, with choruses.” The execution was extremely goo...

November 8, 1852.--Responsibility is my invisible nightmare. To suffer through one’s own fault is a torment worthy of the lost, for so grief is envenomed by ridicule, and the wo...

May 19, 1878.--Criticism is above all a gift, an intuition, a matter of tact and _flair_; it cannot be taught or demonstrated--it is an art. Critical genius means an aptitude fo...

April 30, 1869.--I have just finished Vacherot’s [Footnote: Etienne Vacherot, a French philosophical writer, who owed his first successes in life to the friendship of Cousin, an...

August 3, 1856.--A delightful Sunday afternoon at Pressy. Returned late, under a great sky magnificently starred, with summer lightning playing from a point behind the Jura. Dru...

_Afternoon_--Shall I ever enjoy again those marvelous reveries of past days, as, for instance, once, when I was still quite a youth, in the early dawn, sitting among the ruins o...

March 15, 1879.--I have been turning over “Les histories de mon Parrain” by Stahl, and a few chapters of “Nos Fils et nos Filles” by Legouvé. These writers press wit, grace, gay...

Amiel’s first literary production, or practically his first, seems to have been the result partly of these lectures, and partly of a visit to Italy which began in November, 1841...

Was it that all the while Amiel felt himself sure of his _revanche_ that he knew the value of all those sheets of Journal which were slowly accumulating under his hand? Did he s...

Eleven o’clock.--Preludes, scales, piano-exercises going on under my feet. In the garden children’s voices. I have just finished Rosenkrantz on “Hegel’s Logic,” and have run thr...

March 28, 1881.--I cannot work; I find it difficult to exist. One may be glad to let one’s friends spoil one for a few months; it is an experience which is good for us all; but...