Henri Frédéric Amiel’s diary, 1871

Perpetual effort is the characteristic of modern morality. A painful process has taken the place of the old harmony, the old equilibrium, the old joy and fullness…

I am reading Juste Olivier’s “Chansons du Soir” over again, and all the melancholy of the poet seems to pass into my veins. It is the revelation of a complete…

My reading for this morning has been some vigorous chapters of Taine’s “History of English Literature.” Taine is a writer whose work always produces a disagreeable…

Without intending it, nations educate each other, while having apparently nothing in view but their own selfish interests. It was France who made the Germany of the…

It is in the novel that the average vulgarity of German society, and its inferiority to the societies of France and England, are most clearly visible. The notion of…

Soirée at the M—. About thirty people representing our best society were there, a happy mixture of sexes and ages. There were gray heads, young girls, bright…

For a psychologist it is extremely interesting to be readily and directly conscious of the complications of one’s own organism and the play of its several parts. It…

The international socialism of the ouvriers, ineffectually put down in Paris, is beginning to celebrate its approaching victory. For it there is neither country,…

So long as a man is capable of self-renewal he is a living being. Goethe, Schleiermacher and Humboldt, were masters of the art. If we are to remain among the living…

Re-read, for the second time, Renan’s “Vie de Jesus,” in the sixteenth popular edition. The most characteristic feature of this analysis of Christianity is that sin…

Magnificent weather. The morning seems bathed in happy peace, and a heavenly fragrance rises from mountain and shore; it is as though a benediction were laid upon…

Gray sky—a melancholy day. A friend has left me, the sun is unkind and capricious. Everything passes away, everything forsakes us. And in place of all we have lost,…

I have been reading Bahnsen (“Critique de l’évolutionisme de Hegel-Hartmann, au nom des principes de Schopenhauer”). What a writer! Like a cuttle-fish in water,…