Henri Barbusse famous quotes

04-17-2025

I keep remembering â€” I keep remembering. My heart has no pity on me.
-- Henri Barbusse

#Heart #Remember #Pity
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

#Echoes #People #Looks
All lovers in the world are alike: they fall in love by chance; they see each other, and are attached to each other by the features of their faces; they illuminate each other by the fierce preference which is akin to madness; they assert the reality of illusions; and for a moment they change falsehood into truth.
-- Henri Barbusse

#Falling In Love #Reality #Faces
There is no hell, no inferno except the frenzy of living.
-- Henri Barbusse

#Hell #Inferno
There are cloudy moments when one asks himself if men do not deserve all the disasters into which they rush! No - I recover myself - they do not deserve them. But we, instead of saying â€œI wishâ€ must say â€œI will.â€ And what we will, we must will to build it, with order, with method, beginning at the beginning, when once we have been as far as that beginning. We must not only open our eyes, but our arms, our wings.
-- Henri Barbusse

#Eye #Men #Order
People are machines of forgetfulness
-- Henri Barbusse

#People #Machines #Forgetfulness
I believe, in spite of all, in truth's victory. I believe in the momentous value, hereafter inviolable, of those few truly fraternal men in all the countries of the world, who, in the oscillation of national egoisms let loose, stand up and stand out, steadfast as the glorious statues of Right and Duty.
-- Henri Barbusse

#Country #Believe #Men
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

#Men #Inward #Divinity
We are all, always, the desire not to die. This desire is as immeasurable and varied as life's complexity, but at bottom this is what it is: To continue to be, to be more and more, to develop and to endure. All the force we have, all our energy and clearness of mind serve to intensify themselves in one way or another. We intensify ourselves with new impressions, new sensations, new ideas. We endeavor to take what we do not have and to add it to ourselves. Humanity is the desire for novelty founded upon the fear of death. That is what it is.
-- Henri Barbusse

#Wisdom #Ideas #Humanity
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

#Ignorance #Study #Devotion
I see too deep and too much.
-- Henri Barbusse

#Too Much #Too Deep
Stop war? Impossible! There is no cure for the world's disease.
-- Henri Barbusse

#War #World #Disease
Two armies at death-grips â€” that is one great army committing suicide.
-- Henri Barbusse

#Suicide #Army #Two
It is not a woman I want - it is all women.
-- Henri Barbusse

#Want
Let everything be remade on simple lines. There is only one people, there is only one people!
-- Henri Barbusse

#Simple #People #Lines
We have the divinity of our great misery. And our solitude, with its toilsome ideas, tears and laughter, is fatally divine.
-- Henri Barbusse

#Laughter #Ideas #Solitude
Two armies that fight each other is like one large army that commits suicide.
-- Henri Barbusse

#Suicide #War #Fighting
How I waited for you! How I longed for you! he stammered. "I thought of you all the time. I saw you all the time. Your smile was everywhere." He lowered his voice and added, "Sometimes when people were talking commonplaces and your name happened to be mentioned, It would go through my heart like an electric current.
-- Henri Barbusse

#Heart #Names #Voice
It was suicide. Others killed themselves with poison or with a revolver. I killed myself with minutes and hours.
-- Henri Barbusse

#Suicide #Poison #Hours
The woman from the depths of her rags, a waif, a martyr â€” smiled. She must have a divine heart to be so tired and yet smile.
-- Henri Barbusse

#Tired #Heart #Depth
At the touch of mankind, things wear away with heartbreaking slowness.
-- Henri Barbusse

#Heartbreaking #Mankind
I believe that around us there is only one word on all sides, one immense word which reveals our solitude and extinguishes our radiance: Nothing! I believe that that word does not point to our insignificance or our unhappiness, but on the contrary to our fulfillment and our divinity, since everything is in ourselves.
-- Henri Barbusse

#Believe #Solitude #Divinity

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