Henri Barbusse Short Quotes

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I went to sleep in Chaos, and then I awoke like the first man.

Henri Barbusse
Stop war? Impossible! There is no cure for the world's disease.

Henri Barbusse
I keep remembering — I keep remembering. My heart has no pity on me.

Henri Barbusse
Two armies at death-grips — that is one great army committing suicide.

Henri Barbusse
When I have spoken thus, we are no longer the same, for there are no more lies.

Henri Barbusse
I stood still, a prey to a thousand thoughts, stifled in the robe of the evening.

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

Henri Barbusse
Truth is simple. They who say that truth is complicated deceive themselves, and the truth is not in them.

Henri Barbusse
It was suicide. Others killed themselves with poison or with a revolver. I killed myself with minutes and hours.

Henri Barbusse
All that we can remember is almost nothing. Memory is greater than we are, but memory is living and mortal as well.

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

Henri Barbusse
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
"I have such respect for the actual truth that there are moments when I do not dare to call things by their name," the poet ended.

Henri Barbusse
Once, after we had recalled to each other an enchanted summer evening, I said, "We loved each other," and she answered, "I remember."

Henri Barbusse
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
Will not thoughtful faces arise out of the darkness? (For this is Chaos and the animal Kingdom; and Reason being no more, she has yet to be born.)

Henri Barbusse
I take her hand, as I did before. I speak to her, rather timidly and at random: "Carnal love isn't the whole of love."
"It's love!" Marie answers.

Henri Barbusse
She is one with me. Love — it comes back to me. Love is an unhappy man and unhappy woman.
I awake — uttering the feeble cry of the babe new-born.

Henri Barbusse
The others, one by one, straighten themselves. The storm is falling more heavily on the expanse of flayed and martyred fields. The day is full of night.

Henri Barbusse
Each country will be a moral force, and no longer a brutal force; while all brutal forces clash with themselves, all moral forces make mighty harmony together.

Henri Barbusse
I — my heart — a gaping heart, enthroned in a radiance of blood. It is mine, it is ours. The heart — that wound which we have. I have compassion on myself.

Henri Barbusse
The people who live my truth, what do they say when they speak of themselves? Does the echo of what I am thinking issue from their mouths, or error, or falsehood?

Henri Barbusse
To accomplish the majestically practical work, to shape the whole architecture like a statue, base nothing on impossible modifications of human nature; await nothing from pity.

Henri Barbusse
The poet seemed to be searching for something, to be seeing things, and believing infinitely. He was in another world where everything we see is true and everything we say is unforgettable.

Henri Barbusse
Animals are innocence incarnate. This horse is like an enormous child, and if one wanted to point out life's innocence face to face, one would have to typify, not a little child, but a horse.

Henri Barbusse
I am not slighting intellect; but life is common to us along with poorer living things than ourselves. He who kills an animal, however lowly it may be, unless there is necessity, is an assassin.

Henri Barbusse
We hear talk of sanctified selfishness, of the adorable expansion of one race across the others, of noble hatreds and glorious conquests, and we see these ideals trying to take shape on all hands.

Henri Barbusse