Frases de Henri Fréderic Amiel

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“El cielo, el infierno y el mundo entero, está en nosotros.”

“El amor es el olvido del yo.”

“La vida es un aprendizaje de renunciamiento progresivo, de continua limitación de nuestras pretensiones, de nuestras esperanzas, de nuestra fuerza, de nuestra libertad.”

“No niego los derechos de la democracia; pero no me hago ilusiones respecto al uso que se hará de esos derechos mientras escasee la sabiduría y abunde el orgullo.”

“Dime lo que crees ser y te diré lo que no eres.”

“Una burbuja de aire en la sangre, una gota de agua en el cerebro, bastan para que el hombre se desquicie.”

“El hombre que pretende verlo todo con claridad antes de decidir nunca decide.”

“Sin pasión, el hombre sólo es una fuerza latente que espera una posibilidad, como el pedernal el choque del hierro, para lanzar chispas de luz.”

“Mira dos veces para ver lo justo. No mires más que una vez para ver lo bello.”

“No creo que ningún placer que podamos obtener de nuestras emociones llegue a igualar esos momentos de paz silenciosa que son atisbos de los gozos del paraíso…Se siente una armonía interior libre de la más mínima agitación o tensión. En esos momentos el estado del alma es solemne, semejante quizá a su condición más allá de la tumba. Se trata de felicidad, según entienden los orientales, la felicidad del eremita que se halla libre de deseo y conflicto, y que sencillamente adora en plenitud de dicha.”

“Una religión sin misticismo es como una rosa sin perfume.”

“«Cuando mi amigo está infeliz, voy a su encuentro; cuando está feliz, espero que me encuentre».”

“Cuesta mucho trabajo que la libertad vuelva a la franca unidad del instinto.”

“El destino puede seguir dos caminos para causar nuestra ruina: rehusarnos el cumplimiento de nuestros deseos y cumplirlos plenamente.”

“El tiempo no es sino el espacio entre nuestros recuerdos.”

“Hacer con soltura lo que es difícil a los demás, he ahí la señal del talento; hacer lo que es imposible al talento, he ahí el signo del genio.”

“La crítica convertida en sistema es la negación del conocimiento y de la verdadera estimación de las cosas.”

“La divagación es el domingo del pensamiento.”

“La inconstancia lo echa todo a perder; no deja que ninguna simiente germine.”

“La verdadera humildad consiste en estar satisfecho.”

“La vida no es más que un tejido de hábitos.”

“¿Qué es un espíritu cultivado? Es el que puede mirar las cosas desde muchos puntos de vista.”

“Se entiende a las mujeres como se entiende el lenguaje de los pájaros: por intuición o de ninguna manera.”

“Si existe algún conflicto entre el mundo natural y el moral, entre la realidad y la conciencia, la conciencia es la que debe llevar la razón.”

“Toda necesidad se calma y todo vicio crece con la satisfacción.”

“Un error es tanto más peligroso cuanta más cantidad de verdad contenga.”

“Una manera laboriosa de no ser nada, es serlo todo; de no querer todo; de no querer nada, es quererlo todo.”

“Vivimos mientras nos renovamos.”

“Las mujeres desean ser amadas no porque sean bonitas, o buenas, o bien educadas o graciosas o inteligentes, sino por ser ellas mismas.”

“Quien no acepta el arrepentimiento no acepta la vida.”

“There is but one thing needful — to possess God. All our senses, all our powers of mind and soul, all our external resources, are so many ways of approaching the divinity, so many modes of tasting and of adoring God. We must learn to detach ourselves from all that is capable of being lost, to bind ourselves absolutely only to what is absolute and eternal, and to enjoy the rest as a loan, as a usufruct…. To worship, to comprehend, to receive, to feel, to give, to act: this our law, our duty, our happiness, our heaven.”

“If ignorance and passion are the foes of popular morality, it must be confessed that moral indifference is the malady of the cultivated classes. The modern separation of enlightenment and virtue, of thought and conscience, of the intellectual aristocracy from the honest and common crowd is the greatest danger that can threaten liberty.”

“[There still remains the question whether] he who discovers a new world in the depths of the invisible would not do wisely to plant on it a flag known to himself alone, and, like Achilles, "devour his heart in secret;" whether the greatest problems which have ever been guessed on earth had not better have remained buried in the brain which had found the key to them, and whether the deepest thinkers — those whose hand has been boldest in drawing aside the veil, and their eye keenest in fathoming the mysteries beyond it — had not better, like the prophetess of Ilion, have kept for heaven, and heaven only, secrets and mysteries which human tongue cannot truly express, nor human intelligence conceive.”

“Put personal ambition away from you, and then you will find consolation in living or in dying, whatever may happen to you.”

“To repel one's cross is to make it heavier.”

“This morning the music of a brass band which had stopped under my windows moved me almost to tears. It exercised an indefinable, nostalgic power over me; it set me dreaming of another world, of infinite passion and supreme happiness. Such impressions are the echoes of Paradise in the soul; memories of ideal spheres whose sad sweetness ravishes and intoxicates the heart. O Plato! O Pythagoras! ages ago you heard these harmonies, surprised these moments of inward ecstasy, — knew these divine transports! If music thus carries us to heaven, it is because music is harmony, harmony is perfection, perfection is our dream, and our dream is heaven.”

“Doing easily what others find difficult is talent; doing what is impossible for talent is genius.”

“It gives liberty and breadth to thought, to learn to judge our own epoch from the point of view of universal history, history from the point of view of geological periods, geology from the point of view of astronomy.”

“Liberty, equality — bad principles! The only true principle for humanity is justice; and justice to the feeble becomes necessarily protection or kindness.”

“At bottom there is but one subject of study: the forms and metamorphoses of mind. All other subjects may be reduced to that; all other studies bring us back to this study.”

“To be misunderstood even by those whom one loves is the cross and bitterness of life. It is the secret of that sad and melancholy smile on the lips of great men which so few understand; it is the cruelest trial reserved for self-devotion; it is what must have oftenest wrung the heart of the Son of man; and if God could suffer, it would be the wound we should be forever inflicting upon Him. He also — He above all — is the great misunderstood, the least comprehended.”

“Truth is the secret of eloquence and of virtue, the basis of moral authority; it is the highest summit of art and of life.”

“The spirit of sarcasm lives and thrives in the midst of universal wreck; its balls are enchanted and itself invulnerable, and it braves retaliations and reprisals because itself is a mere flash, a bodiless and magical nothing.”

“I have never felt any inward assurance of genius, or any presentiment of glory or of happiness. I have never seen myself in imagination great or famous, or even a husband, a father, an influential citizen. This indifference to the future, this absolute self-distrust, are, no doubt, to be taken as signs. What dreams I have are all vague and indefinite; I ought not to live, for I am now scarcely capable of living.”

“There is a great affinity in me with the Hindu genius - that mind, vast, imaginative, loving, dreamy and speculative, but destitute of ambition, personality and will. Pantheistic disinterestedness, the effacement of the self in the great whole, womanish gentleness, a horror of slaughter, antipathy to action - these are all present in my nature, in the nature at least which has been developed by years and circumstances. Still the West has also its part in me. What I have found difficult to keep up a prejudice in favor of my form, nationality or individuality whatever. Hence my indifference to my own person, my own usefulness, interest or opinions of the moment. What does it all matter? It is not perhaps not a bad thing,' he says, 'that in the midst of the devouring activities of the Western world there should be a few Brahmanical souls.”

“Almost everything comes from nothing.”

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

“Work while you have the light. You are responsible for the talent that has been entrusted to you.”

“Society lives by faith, develops by reason.”