Faith & Spirit Quote by Henri Frederic Amiel

A neat Victorian provocation: keep your prayers, but don’t pretend they’re doing the engineering. Amiel splits civilization into two engines that rarely admit they need each other. “Society lives by faith” isn’t just about religion; it’s about the shared fictions that make cooperation possible at scale. Nations, laws, marriage, money, even “the future” are all belief-systems before they’re institutions. Faith, in Amiel’s broad sense, is social glue: trust in strangers, loyalty to a story, commitment to rules that can’t be proven every morning.

Then he turns the knife: society “develops by science.” Not “understands,” not “contemplates,” but develops - materially, measurably, irreversibly. This is a 19th-century thinker watching Europe modernize under the pressure of industrialization, Darwin, and the emerging authority of research. Science is the method that converts doubt into tools, and tools into power. Amiel’s line quietly demotes metaphysics from motor to fuel: faith keeps people moving; science determines where the road actually goes.

The subtext is a warning to both camps. To the faithful: don’t confuse moral cohesion with factual knowledge. To the scientific modernizers: don’t assume data can replace meaning. A society run purely on scientific rationality risks becoming technically brilliant and socially brittle; one run purely on faith risks becoming cohesive and stagnant. The sentence works because it’s balanced but not neutral: “lives” is vulnerable, intimate; “develops” is ambitious, almost ruthless. Amiel gives each its domain, then dares you to notice how often we let one impersonate the other.