Muriel Barbery famous quotes

Colombe Josse is the older Jesse daughter. Colombe Jesse is also a sort of tall blonde leek who dresses like a penniless Bohemian. If there is one thing I despise, it is the perverse affectation of rich people who go around dressing as if they were poor, in second-hand clothes, ill-fitting gray bonnets, socks full of holes, and flowered shirts under threadbare sweaters. Not only is it ugly, it is also insulting: nothing is more despicable than a rich man's scorn for a poor man's longing.
-- Muriel Barbery

#Daughter #Gratitude #Men

People aim for the stars, and they end up like goldfish in a bowl. I wonder if it wouldn't be simpler just to teach children right from the start that life is absurd.
-- Muriel Barbery

#Life #Stars #Children

There's so much humanity in a love of trees, so much nostalgia for our first sense of wonder, so much power in just feeling our own insignificance when we are surrounded by nature,
-- Muriel Barbery

#Tree #Feelings #Humanity

Personally I think that grammar is a way to attain beauty.
-- Muriel Barbery

#Thinking #Way #Grammar

The real ordeal is not leaving those you love but learning to live without those who don't love you.
-- Muriel Barbery

#Real #Love You #Leaving

In our world, that's the way you live your grown-up life: you must constantly rebuild your identity as an adult, the way it's been put together it is wobbly, ephemeral, and fragile, it cloaks despair and, when you're alone in front of the mirror, it tells you the lies you need to believe.
-- Muriel Barbery

#Lying #Believe #Our World

I thought: pity the poor in spirit who know neither the enchantment nor the beauty of language.
-- Muriel Barbery

#Enchantment #Spirit #Language

With the exception of love, friendship and the beauty of art, I don't see much else that can nurture human life.
-- Muriel Barbery

#Art #Friendship Love #Human Life

When someone that you love dies..it's like fireworks suddenly burning out in the sky and everything going black.
-- Muriel Barbery

#Sky #Black #Burning

Sashimi is velvet dust, verging on silk, or a bit of both, and the extraordinary alchemy of its gossamer essence allows it to preserve a milky density unknown even by clouds.... my cheeks recalled the effects of its profound caress.
-- Muriel Barbery

#Dust #Essence #Clouds

But many intelligent people have a sort of bug: they think intelligence is an end in itself. They have one idea in mind: to be intelligent, which is really stupid. And when intelligence takes itself for its own goal, it operates very strangely: the proof that it exists is not to be found in the ingenuity or simplicity of what it produces, but in how obscurely it is expressed.
-- Muriel Barbery

#Stupid #Intelligent #Thinking

...we have to surpass ourselves every day, make every day undying. Climb our own personal Everest and do it in such a way that every step is a little bit of eternity. That's what the future is for: to build the present, with real plans, made by living people.
-- Muriel Barbery

#Inspirational #Real #People

Talent consists not in inventing shapes but in causing those that were invisible to emerge.
-- Muriel Barbery

#Shapes #Talent #Invisible

Entrusting one's life is not the same as opening up one's soul.
-- Muriel Barbery

#Opening Up #Soul #Life Is

We think we can make honey without sharing in the fate of bees, but we are in truth nothing but poor bees, destined to accomplish our task and then die.
-- Muriel Barbery

#Fate #Thinking #Tasks

When tea becomes ritual, it takes place at the heart of our ability to see greatness in small things.
-- Muriel Barbery

#Heart #Greatness #Tea

I won't get any better by punishing the people I can't heal.
-- Muriel Barbery

#People #Heal

They didn't recognize me," I repeat. He stops in turn, my hand still on his arm. "It is because they have never seen you," he says. "I would recognize you anywhere.
-- Muriel Barbery

#Hands #Arms #Turns

Beautiful things should belong to beautiful souls.
-- Muriel Barbery

#Beautiful #Soul #Should

When something is bothering me, I seek refuge. No need to travel far; a trip to the realm of literary memory will suffice. For where can one find more noble distraction, more entertaining company, more delightful enchantment than in literature?
-- Muriel Barbery

#Memories #Enchantment #Needs

There's so much humanity in a love of trees, so much nostalgia for our first sense of wonder, so much power in just feeling our own insignificance when we are surrounded by nature...yes, that's it: just thinking about trees and their indifferent majesty and our love for them teaches us how ridiculous we are - vile parasites squirming on the surface of the earth - and at the same time how deserving of life we can be, when we can honor this beauty that owes us nothing.
-- Muriel Barbery

#Thinking #Tree #Feelings

Live or die: mere consequences of what you have built. What matters is building well.
-- Muriel Barbery

#What Matters #Building #Wells

Civilization is the mastery of violence, the triumph, constantly challenged, over the aggressive nature of the primate. For primates we have been and primates we shall remain, however often we learn to find joy in a camellia on moss. This is the very purpose of education.
-- Muriel Barbery

#Civilization #Joy #Mastery

I witness the birth on paper of sentences that have eluded my will and appear in spite of me on the sheet, teaching me something that I neither knew nor thought I might want to know. This painless birth, like an unsolicited proof, gives me untold pleasure, and with neither toil nor certainty but the joy of frank astonishment I follw the pen that is guiding and supporting me.
-- Muriel Barbery

#Teaching #Giving #Joy

Some people are incapable of perceiving in the object of their contemplation the very thing that gives it its intrinsic life and breath, and they spend their entire lives conversing about mankind as if they were robots, and about things as if they have no soul and must be reduced to what can be said about them -- all at the whim of their own subjective inspiration.
-- Muriel Barbery

#Inspiration #Giving #People

Maybe that's what being alive is about: so we can track down those movments that are dying.
-- Muriel Barbery

#Track #Dying #Alive

The raw tomato, devoured in the garden when freshly picked, is a horn of abundance of simple sensations, a radiating rush in one's mouth that brings with it every pleasure. . . . a tomato, an adventure.
-- Muriel Barbery

#Adventure #Simple #Garden

A man who farts in bed . . . is a man who loves life.
-- Muriel Barbery

#Love Life #Men #Bed

boredom was born on a day of uniformity.
-- Muriel Barbery

#Boredom #Born

Elsewhere the world may be blustering or sleeping, wars are fought, people live and die, some nations disintegrate, while others are born, soon to be swallowed up in turn - and in all this sound and fury, amidst eruptions and undertows, while the world goes its merry way, bursts into flames, tears itself apart and is reborn: human life continues to throb.
-- Muriel Barbery

#War #Sleep #Flames

To the rich, therefore, falls the burden of Beauty. And if they cannot assume it, then they deserve to die.
-- Muriel Barbery

#Fall #Assuming #Rich

When illness enters a home, not only does it take hold of a body. It also weaves a dark web between hearts, a web where hope is trapped.
-- Muriel Barbery

#Heart #Home #Dark

shocked to realize how much vitality is required simply to support our primitive requirements, we wonder, bewildered, where Art fits in.
-- Muriel Barbery

#Art #Support #Requirements

art is emotion without desire.
-- Muriel Barbery

#Art #Desire #Emotion

The strong ones among humans do nothing. They talk and talk again.
-- Muriel Barbery

#Strong #Humans

Conclusion: better to be a thinking monk than a postmodern thinker.
-- Muriel Barbery

#Thinking #Monk #Conclusion

Because art is life, playing to other rhythms.
-- Muriel Barbery

#Art #Rhythm #Art Is

I'm afraid to go into myself and see what's going on in there.
-- Muriel Barbery

Tasting is an act of pleasure and writing about that pleasure is an artistic gesture, but the only true work of art, in the end, is another person's feast.
-- Muriel Barbery

#Art #Writing #Gestures

To be poor, ugly and, moreover, intelligent condemns one in our society to a dark and disillusioned life...to beauty all is forgiven.
-- Muriel Barbery

#Dark #Intelligent #Ugly

Levin delights in the forgetfulness that movement brings, where the pleasure of doing is marvellously foreign to the striving of the will.
-- Muriel Barbery

#Delight #Movement #Pleasure

Humans live in a world where the weak are dominant. This is a terrible insult to our animal nature, a sort of perversion or a deep contradiction.
-- Muriel Barbery

#Animal #World #Insult

...I am an anomaly in the system, living proof of how grotesque it is, and every day I mock it gently, deep within my impenetrable self.
-- Muriel Barbery

#Self #Anomalies #Grotesque

I may be indigent in name, position, and in appearance, but in my own mind I am an unrivaled goddess -
-- Muriel Barbery

#Names #Mind #May

Moments like this act as magical interludes, placing our hearts at the edge of our souls: fleetingly, yet intensely, a fragment of eternity has come to enrich time...When tea becomes ritual, it takes its place at the heart of our ability to see greatness in small things.
-- Muriel Barbery

#Heart #Greatness #Soul

To beauty, all is forgiven, even vulgarity. Intelligence no longer seems an adequate compensation for things...
-- Muriel Barbery

#Adequate #Forgiven #Vulgarity

As always, I am saved by the inability of living creatures to believe anything that might cause the walls of their little mental assumptions to crumble.
-- Muriel Barbery

#Wall #Believe #Littles

If you have but one friend, make sure you choose her well.
-- Muriel Barbery

#Inspiring #Friends #Wells

..when I say that "he's a truly nasty man," I mean he has so thoroughly renounced everything good that he might have inside him that he's already like a corpse even though he's still alive. Because truly nasty people hate everyone, to be sure, but most of all themselves. Can't you tell when a person hates himself? He becomes a living cadaver, it numbs all his negative emotions but also all the good ones so he won't feel nauseated by who he is.
-- Muriel Barbery

#Hate #Mean #Men

...what I dread more than anything else in this life is noise...silence helps you to go inward..anyone who is interested in something more than just life outside actually needs silence.
-- Muriel Barbery

#Silence #Needs #Inward

When tea becomes ritual, it takes its place at the heart of our ability to see greatness in small things. Where is beauty to be found? In great things that, like everything else, are doomed to die, or in small things that aspire to nothing, yet know how to set a jewel of infinity in a single moment?
-- Muriel Barbery

#Heart #Greatness #Jewels

. . . maybe that's what life's all about: there's a lof of despair, but also the odd moments of beauty, where time is no longer the same . . . [like] something suspended . . . an elsewhere . . . an always within a never. Yes, that's is, an always within a never.
-- Muriel Barbery

#Despair #Odd #Moments

It would be so much better if we could share our insecurity, if we could all venture inside ourselves and realize that green beans and vitamin C, however much they nurture us, cannot save lives, or sustain our souls.
-- Muriel Barbery

#Soul #Insecurity #Would Be

Pastries . . . can only be appreciated to the full extent of their subtlety when they are not eaten to assuage our hunger, when the orgy of their sugary sweetness is not destined to full some primary need but to coat our palate with all the benevolence of the world.
-- Muriel Barbery

#Coats #Needs #World

...This is the first time I have met someone who seeks out people and who sees beyond...We never look beyond our assumptions and, what's worse, we have given up trying to meet others; we just meet ourselves. We don't recognize each other because other people have become our permanent mirrors. If we actually realized this, if we were to become aware of the fact that we are alone in the wilderness, we would go crazy...As for me, I implore fate to give me the chance to see beyond myself and truly meet someone.
-- Muriel Barbery

#Crazy #Fate #Mirrors

I have read so many books. And yet, like most Autodidacts, I am never quite sure of what I have gained from them. There are days when I feel I have been able to grasp all there is know in one single gaze, as if invisible branches suddenly spring out of no where, weaving together all the disparate strands of my reading. And then suddenly the meaning escapes, the essence evaporates and no matter how often I reread the same lines they seem to flee ever further with each subsequent reading and I see myself as some mad old fool who thinks her stomach is full because she's been reading the menu.
-- Muriel Barbery

#Spring #Book #Reading

What is writing, no matter how lavish the pieces, if it says nothing of the truth, cares little for the heart, and is merely subservient to the pleasure of showing one's brilliance.
-- Muriel Barbery

#Heart #Writing #Pieces

Yes, the world may aspire to vacuousness, lost souls mourn beauty, insignificance surrounds us. Then let us drink a cup of tea. Silence descends, one hears the wind outside, autumn leaves rustle and take flight, the cat sleeps in a warm pool of light. And, with each swallow, time is sublimed.
-- Muriel Barbery

#Sleep #Cat #Autumn

Yes, our eyes may perceive, yet they do not observe; they may believe, yet they do not question; they may receive yet they do not search: they are emptied of desire, with neither hunger nor passion.(Renee Michel)
-- Muriel Barbery

#Believe #Eye #Passion

This pause in time, within time ... When did I first experience the exquisite sense of surrender that is only possible with another person? The peace of mind one experiences on one's own, one's certainty of self in the serenity of solitude, are nothing in comparison to the release and openness and fluency one shares with another, in close companionship ...
-- Muriel Barbery

#Self #Serenity #Solitude

We musn't forget old people with their rotten bodies, old people who are so close to death, something that young people don't want to think about. We musn't forget that our bodies decline, friends die, everyone forgets about us, and the end is solitude. Nor must we forget that these old people were young once, that a lifespan is pathetically short, that one day you're twenty and the next day you're eighty.
-- Muriel Barbery

#Thinking #People #Solitude

Madame Michel has the elegance of the hedgehog: on the outside she is covered in quills, a real fortress, but my gut feeling is that on the inside, she has the same simple refinement as the hedgehog: a deceptively indolent little creature, fiercely solitary--and terrible elegant.
-- Muriel Barbery

#Real #Simple #Feelings

People think that children don't know anything. It's enough to make you wonder if grownups were ever children once upon a time.
-- Muriel Barbery

#Children #Thinking #People

I know that they're all unhappy because nobody loves the right person the way they should and because they don't understand that it's really their own self that they're mad at.
-- Muriel Barbery

#Self #Mad #Unhappy

Don't worry Renee, I won't commit suicide and I won't burn a thing. Because from now on, for you, I'll be searching for those moments of always within never. Beauty, in this world.
-- Muriel Barbery

#Suicide #Worry #World

Poverty is a reaper: it harvests everything inside us that might have made us capable of social intercourse with others, and leaves us empty, purged of feeling, so that we may endure all the darkness of the present day.
-- Muriel Barbery

#Compassion #Darkness #Feelings

I may know that the world is an ugly place, I still don't want to see it.
-- Muriel Barbery

#May #Want #World

... they have never seen you ... I would recognize you anywhere.
-- Muriel Barbery

Do you know that it is in your company that I have had my finest thoughts?
-- Muriel Barbery

#Finest #Company

..if you dread tomorrow, it's because you don't know how to build the present, you tell yourself you can deal with it tomorrow, and it's a lost cause anyway because tomorrow always ends up becoming today, don't you see?
-- Muriel Barbery

#Today #Causes #Becoming

Don't let the cat out or the concierge in: this is the first principle of socialist ladies.
-- Muriel Barbery

#Cat #Firsts #Principles