Top 44 Henri Barbusse Quotes
#1. The memory of you saddened my joys, but consoled my sorrows.
Henri Barbusse
#2. I am more sensitive than other people. Things that other people would not notice awaken a distinct echo in me, and in such moments of lucidity, when I look at myself, I see that I am alone, all alone, all alone.
Henri Barbusse
#3. The love we have for our native land would be good and praiseworthy if it did not degenerate, as we see it does everywhere, into vanity, the spirit of predominance, acquisitiveness, hate, envy, nationalism, and militarism
Henri Barbusse
#4. I had no genius, no mission to fulfill, no great heart to bestow. I had nothing and I deserved nothing. But all the same I desired some sort of reward.
Henri Barbusse
#5. It is not by sin that we attain happiness, nor is it by virtue, nor is it by that kind of divine fire by which one makes great instinctive decisions and which is neither good not evil. It is by none of these things that one reaches happiness. One never reaches happiness.
Henri Barbusse
#6. You can no more look destiny in the face than you can look at the sun, and yet destiny is grey
Henri Barbusse
#9. Stop war? Impossible! There is no cure for the world's disease.
Henri Barbusse
#10. I saw that they wanted to kill the past. When we are old, we let it die; when we are young and strong, we kill it.
Henri Barbusse
#11. I am incapable of carrying on a discussion to fruitful lengths. I am incapable of the audacity of being logical. I confess to you, my boy, I have not the strength to be right.
Henri Barbusse
#12. Happiness needs unhappiness. Joy goes hand in hand with sorrow. It is thanks to the shadow that we exist. We must not dream of an absurd abstraction. We must guard the bond that links us to blood and earth.
Henri Barbusse
#13. Humanity is the desire for novelty founded upon the fear of death
Henri Barbusse
#14. We have the divinity of our great misery. And our solitude, with its toilsome ideas, tears and laughter, is fatally divine.
Henri Barbusse
#15. At the touch of mankind, things wear away with heartbreaking slowness.
Henri Barbusse
#16. I was not at ease that night. I was a prey to an immense distress. I sat as if I had fallen into my chair. As on the first day I looked at my reflection in the glass, and all I could do was just what I had done then, simply cry, I!
Henri Barbusse
#17. I watched her cry
drown herself in a flood of tears. It is a great thing to be in the presence of a rational being who cries. A weak, broken creature shedding tears makes the same impression as an all-powerful god to whom one prays. In her weakness and defeat Amy was above human power.
Henri Barbusse
#18. I saw nothing more now than the pallor of my face, with deep orbits, buried in the twilight, and my mouth filled with a silence which gently but surely stifles and destroys.
Henri Barbusse
#20. Let everything be remade on simple lines. There is only one people, there is only one people!
Henri Barbusse
#21. There is an attraction for you which does not exist for me, since I do not feel any pleasure. You see, we are making a bargain. You give me a dream, I give you joy. But all this is not love.
Henri Barbusse
#22. But now I was tired of having desired too much. I suddenly felt old. I should never recover from the wound in my breast. The dream of peace that I had had a moment before attracted and tempted me only because it was far away. Had I realised it, I should simply have dreamed another dream.
Henri Barbusse
#23. And night came, as every night will come, until the last one, which will be too vast.
Henri Barbusse
#24. Human contact wears things out with disheartening slowness.
Henri Barbusse
#27. Whatever our ignorance left to itself, and whatever the wounds that other human beings are, we ought to study ourselves with a sort of devotion.
Henri Barbusse
#28. It is a vice to spend years and centuries saying of progress, 'I should like it, but I do not want it.
Henri Barbusse
#29. Ah, my poor child, how far gone you are in your blindness! Why did you have me summoned?"
"I had hopes, I had hopes."
"Hopes? Hopes of what?"
"I do not know. The things we hope for are always the things we do not know.
Henri Barbusse
#30. Yes, there is a Divinity, one from which we must never turn aside for the guidance of our huge inward life and of the share we have as well in the life of all men. It is called the truth.
Henri Barbusse
#31. I love you, but I love the past even more. I long for it, I long for it, I am consumed with longing for it. The past! I shall cry, I shall suffer because the past will never come back again.
Henri Barbusse
#32. Sin, sin! To rid myself of boredom by committing a crime, to break up monotony by deceiving. To sin in order to be a new person, another person. To hate life worse than it hated me. To sin so as not to die.
Henri Barbusse
#33. I keep remembering - I keep remembering. My heart has no pity on me.
Henri Barbusse
#34. I saw him look at the clock and at the door. He was thinking of leaving. He turned his face gently away from a kiss she was about to give him. There was a suggestion of uneasiness, almost disgust, in his expression.
Henri Barbusse
#35. There is no paradise except that which we create in the great tomb of the churches. There is no hell, no inferno except the frenzy of living.
Henri Barbusse
#36. I had no children and shall have none. There are moments when this troubles me, when I reflect that with me a line will end which has lasted since the beginning of humanity.
Henri Barbusse
#37. Patriotism has become a narrow offensive sentiment which as long as it lives will maintain war and exhaust the world
Henri Barbusse
#38. Two armies that fight each other is like one large army that commits suicide.
Henri Barbusse
#39. When you have just lost a beloved there is a wretched moment, after the brutal shock, when you begin to understand that all is over, and blank despair surrounds you and looms like a giant.
Henri Barbusse
#40. It was her work of art, her poem and her prayer, to repeat this story, low and precipitately, as if she were in the confessional. You felt that she came to it quite naturally, without transition, so completely did it posses her whenever they were alone.
Henri Barbusse
#41. These two were together, but in reality far apart. They had left each other without leaving each other.
Henri Barbusse
#42. Two armies at death-grips - that is one great army committing suicide.
Henri Barbusse
#43. It was suicide. Others killed themselves with poison or with a revolver. I killed myself with minutes and hours.
Henri Barbusse
#44. The woman from the depths of her rags, a waif, a martyr - smiled. She must have a divine heart to be so tired and yet smile.
Henri Barbusse
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