delicacy of perception. Amiel wrote also several essays and
poems, but it is for the "Intimate Diary" alone that his name
will be remembered.


_Thoughts on Life and Conduct_


Only one thing is needful--to possess God. The senses, the powers of the
soul, and all outward resources are so many vistas opening upon
Divinity, so many ways of tasting and adoring God. To be detached from
all that is fugitive, and to seize only on the eternal and the absolute,
using the rest as no more than a loan, a tenancy! To worship,
understand, receive, feel, give, act--this is your law, your duty, your
heaven!

After all, there is only one object which we can study, and that is the
modes and metamorphoses of the human spirit. All other studies lead us
back to this one.

I have never felt the inward assurance of genius, nor the foretaste of
celebrity, nor of happiness, nor even the prospect of being husband,
father, or respected citizen. This indifference to the future is itself
a sign; my dreams are vague, indefinite; I must not now live, because I
am now hardly capable of living. Let me control myself; let me leave
life to the living, and betake myself to my ideas; let me write the
testament of my thoughts and of my heart.


_Heroism and Duty_