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?©d?©ric

"Amiel's Journal"


Consciousness is a universe, and its sun is love....
Already I am falling back into the objective life of thought. It
delivers me from--shall I say? no, it deprives me of the intimate life
of feeling. Reflection solves reverie and burns her delicate wings. This
is why science does not make men, but merely entities and abstractions.
Ah, let us feel and live and beware of too much analysis! Let us put
spontaneity, _naivete_, before reflection, experience before study; let
us make life itself our study. Shall I then never have the heart of a
woman to rest upon? a son in whom to live again, a little world where I
may see flowering and blooming all that is stifled in me? I shrink and
draw back, for fear of breaking my dream. I have staked so much on this
card that I dare not play it. Let me dream again....
Do no violence to yourself, respect in yourself the oscillations of
feeling. They are your life and your nature; One wiser than you ordained
them. Do not abandon yourself altogether either to instinct or to will.
Instinct is a siren, will a despot. Be neither the slave of your
impulses and sensations of the moment, nor of an abstract and general
plan; be open to what life brings from within and without, and welcome
the unforeseen; but give to your life unity, and bring the unforeseen
within the lines of your plan.


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