Henri Frederic Amiel Quotes

My mind's cries tell me that everything on earth is tragic. My heart's smiles tell me that everything on earth is magic.

We are like vessels tossed on the bosom of the deep; our passions are the winds that sweep us impetuously forward; each pleasure is a rock; the whole life is a wide ocean. Reason is the pilot to guide us, but often allows itself to be led astray by the storms of pride.

That has been my entire life story, running against the current and running with the current. Sometimes running with the current is underestimated.

There are more truths in twenty-four hours of a man's life than in all the philosophies.

My point of view when I make a book or I make a movie is to see the humanistic point of view. The point of view of the daily life of normal people.

There's no social realism in 'Tyrannosaur.' It's not about the social landscape or the political landscape or any of that. It's just about human beings. I never made 'Tyrannosaur' in reference to anybody - I just made it because I had to make my own films.

The worldview implied by literary fiction is complex and ambiguous, trying to be faithful to the complexity and ambiguity of life.

I want to show that drama doesn't lie only in blood and destroyed buildings but in daily life, in ordinary human beings.

Songwriters such as Alanis Morissette write about the constant balance of contradictions, and that's something I adhere to in my life and work.

To be a man, to have been born without knowing it or wanting it, to be thrown into the ocean of existence, to be obliged to swim, to exist; to have an identity; to resist the pressure and shocks from the outside and the unforeseen and unforeseeable acts - one's own and those of others - which so often exceed one's capacities? And what is more, to endure one's own thoughts about all this: in a word, to be human.

To labour is the lot of man below; And when Jove gave us life, he gave us woe.

Psychoanalysis feeds on intensity, as though life were all flame and no ash.

The ingredients of both darkness and light are equally present in all of us,...The madness of this planet is largely a result of the human being's difficulty in coming to viruous balance with himself.

All our life passes in this way: we seek rest by struggling against certain obstacles, and once they are overcome, rest proves intolerable because of the boredom it produces.

...in certain moods, no man can weigh this world without throwing in something, somehow like Original Sin, to strike the uneven balance.

Stories always have held conflicts and contrasts, highs and lows, life and death situations. And there can be much suffering in stories, but now we say the artist doesn’t have to suffer to show suffering. You just have to understand the human condition, understand the suffering.

We are at war between consciousness and nature, between the desire for permanence and the fact of flux. It is ourself against ourselves.

I feel like a small battlefield in which the problems, or some of the problems, of our time are being fought out. All one can hope to do is keep oneself humbly available, to allow oneself to be a battlefield. After all, the problems must be accommodated, have somewhere to struggle and come to rest and we, poor little humans, must put our inner space at their service and not run away.

Man staggers through life yapped at by his reason, pulled and shoved by his appetites, whispered to by fears, beckoned by hopes. Small wonder that what he craves most is self-forgetting.

Trout was petrified there on Forty-second Street. It had given him a life not worth living, but I had also given him an iron will to live. This was a common combination on the planet Earth.

For clearly it is impossible to touch eternity with one hand and life with the other.

What is life? A gulf of troubled waters, where the soul, like a vexed bark, is tossed upon the waves of pain and pleasure by the wavering breath of passions.

It's hard to enjoy practical jokes when your whole life feels like one.

What seems conceit, bad manners or cynicism is always a sign of things no ear have heard, no eyes have seen. You do not know what wars are going on down there where the spirit meets the bone.