Jules Renard - The journal of Jules Renard

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Our dream dashes itself against the great mystery like a wasp against a window pane. Less merciful than man, God never opens the window.

Jules Renard
The danger of success is that it makes us forget the world's dreadful injustice.

Jules Renard
The profession of letters is, after all, the only one in which one can make no money without being ridiculous.

Jules Renard
The reward of great men is that, long after they have died, one is not quite sure that they are dead

Jules Renard
How describe the delicate thing that happens when a brilliant insect alights on a flower? Words, with their weight, fall upon the picture like birds of prey.

Jules Renard
The strong do not hesitate. They settle down, they sweat, they go on to the end. They exhaust the ink, they use up the paper.

Jules Renard
We are in the world to laugh. In purgatory or in hell we shall no longer be able to do so. And in heaven it would not be proper.

Jules Renard
Whenever I have talked to anyone at too great length, I am like a man who has drunk too much, and ashamed, doesn't know where to put himself.

Jules Renard
It is more difficult to be an honorable man for a week than to be a hero for fifteen minutes.

Jules Renard
There are places and moments in which one is so completely alone that one sees the world entire.

Jules Renard
There is a justice, but we do not always see it. Discreet, smiling, it is there, at one side, a little behind injustice, which makes a big noise.

Jules Renard
In literature, there are only oxen. The biggest ones are the geniuses-the ones who toil eighteen hours a day without tiring.

Jules Renard
The void yields up nothing. You have to be a great poet to make it ring.

Jules Renard
I have a remarkable memory; I forget everything. It is wonderfully convenient. It is as though the world were constantly renewing itself for me.

Jules Renard
You can recover from the writing malady only by falling mortally ill and dying.

Jules Renard
At the bottom of all patriotism there is war: that is why I am no patriot.

Jules Renard
Do not ask me to be kind; just ask me to act as though I were.

Jules Renard
Let us stay at home: there we are decent. Let us not go out: our defects wait for us at the door, like flies.

Jules Renard
Walks. The body advances, while the mind flutters around it like a bird.

Jules Renard
Love kills intelligence. The brain and the heart act upon each other in the manner of an hour-glass. One fills itself only to empty the other.

Jules Renard
Literature is an occupation in which you have to keep proving your talent to people who have none

Jules Renard
In the most complete friendship there is always a little empty space, like the space in an egg.

Jules Renard
When I think of all the books still left for me to read, I am certain of further happiness.

Jules Renard
I have no religion,' says Borneau, 'but I respect the religion of others. Religion is sacred.' Why this privilege, this immunity?... A believer creates God in his own image; if he is ugly, his God will be morally ugly. Why should moral ugliness be respectable?

Jules Renard
Talent is a question of quantity. Talent does not write one page: it writes three hundred.

Jules Renard
Those moments when you feel you want to read something truly beautiful. The eyes make a tour of the library, and there is nothing. Then you decide to take no matter what, and it is full of beautiful things.

Jules Renard
When the defects of others are perceived with so much clarity, it is because one possesses them oneself.

Jules Renard
We are ignorant of the Beyond because this ignorance is the condition of our own life. Just as ice cannot know fire except by melting and vanishing.

Jules Renard
It astounds us to come upon other egoists, as though we alone had the right to be selfish, and to be filled with eagerness to live.

Jules Renard
I am afraid I shall not find him, but I shall still look for him, for if he exists, he may be appreciative of my efforts.

Jules Renard