Henri Frédéric Amiel’s diary, 1866

Our life is but a soap-bubble hanging from a reed; it is formed, expands to its full size, clothes itself with the loveliest colors of the prism, and even escapes…

This evening after supper I did not know whither to betake my solitary self. I was hungry for conversation, society, exchange of ideas. It occurred to me to go and…

The gray curtain of mist has spread itself again over the town; everything is dark and dull. The bells are ringing in the distance for some festival; with this…

The snow is melting and a damp fog is spread over everything. The asphalt gallery which runs along the salon is a sheet of quivering water starred incessantly by…

The novel by Miss Mulock, “John Halifax, Gentleman,” is a bolder book than it seems, for it attacks in the English way the social problem of equality. And the…

If philosophy is the art of understanding, it is evident that it must begin by saturating itself with facts and realities, and that premature abstraction kills it,…

Panic, confusion, sauve qui peut on the Bourse at Paris. In our epoch of individualism, and of “each man for himself and God for all,” the movements of the public…

I have just read the procès-verbal of the Conference of Pastors held on the 15th and 16th of April at Paris. The question of the supernatural has split the church…

My old friends are, I am afraid, disappointed in me; they think that I do nothing, that I have deceived their expectations and their hopes. I, too, am disappointed.…

I have just picked up on the stairs a little yellowish cat, ugly and pitiable. Now, curled up in a chair at my side, he seems perfectly happy, and as if he wanted…

It is raining over the whole sky—as far at least as I can see from my high point of observation. All is gray from the Salève to the Jura, and from the pavement to…

Skepticism pure and simple as the only safeguard of intellectual independence—such is the point of view of almost all our young men of talent. Absolute freedom from…