Education Quote by Henri Frederic Amiel

Self-acceptance, in Amiel's hands, is less a wellness slogan than a strict moral discipline. "Learn to... be what you are" sounds gentle until you notice the verb: learn. Identity here isn't discovered once and celebrated; it's practiced, trained, and repeatedly corrected. Amiel treats the self as something you can fail at by pretending, posturing, or chasing a personality that flatters your vanity.

The second clause sharpens the blade: "resign with a good grace all that you are not". "Resign" is an unfashionably hard word. It implies surrender, even loss, but without melodrama. The subtext is that most misery comes from a kind of imaginative overreach: wanting talents you don't have, a temperament that isn't yours, a life built for someone else's gifts. "Good grace" is the key modifier. He isn't advocating dour fatalism; he's prescribing a socially and spiritually elegant refusal to resent reality. Grace turns limitation into dignity.

Context matters. Amiel, a 19th-century Swiss philosopher best known for his introspective Journal intime, wrote out of a Protestant-inflected culture that prized self-scrutiny and restraint. His era's romantic worship of the exceptional genius was in the air, but Amiel answers it with an ethic of accurate self-knowledge. The line is quietly combative: against aspiration as delusion, against envy as identity theft, against the modern habit of treating the self as an infinite project. The intent isn't to shrink you; it's to stop you from wasting a life on impersonation.