Best 30 quotes of Henri Barbusse on MyQuotes

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.

At the touch of mankind, things wear away with heartbreaking slowness.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I do not regret my youth and its beliefs. Up to now, I have wasted my time to live. Youth is the true force, but it is too rarely lucid. Sometimes it has a triumphant liking for what is now, and the pugnacious broadside of paradox may please it. But there is a degree in innovation which they who have not lived very much cannot attain. And yet who knows if the stern greatness of present events will not have educated and aged the generation which to-day forms humanity's effective frontier? Whatever our hope may be, if we did not place it in youth, where should we place it?

I see too deep and too much.

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

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

People are machines of forgetfulness

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

There is no hell, no inferno except the frenzy of living.

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 "I wish" must say "I will." 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.

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.

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

Two armies that fight each other is like one large army that commits suicide.

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

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.

En la luz, la apariencia; en la sombra, nosotros. La sombra es la realidad de milagro que traduce lo invisible.

Es la imagen más pura de la mujer amada: la que aún no conocemos totalmente, la que se revelará, la que tiene en sí el único milagro viviente que existe en la tierra.

Humanity is the desire for novelty founded upon the fear of death

I had seen the struggle to love and make one's self understood, the refusal of two persons in conversation to give themselves to each other, the coming together of two lovers, the lovers with an infectious smile, who are lovers in name only, who bury themselves in kisses, who press wound to wound to cure themselves, between whom there is really no attachment, and who, in spite of their ecstasy deriving light from shadow, are strangers as much as the sun and the moon are strangers.

Mais, j’aurai beau supplier, j’aurai beau me révolter, il n’y aura plus rien pour moi ; je ne serai, désormais, ni heureux, ni malheureux. Je ne peux pas ressusciter. Je vieillirai aussi tranquille que je le suis aujourd’hui dans cette chambre où tant d’êtres ont laissé leur trace, où aucun être n’a laissé la sienne. Cette chambre, on la retrouve à chaque pas. C’est la chambre de tout le monde. On croit qu’elle est fermée, non : elle est ouverte aux quatre vents de l’espace. Elle est perdue au milieu des chambres semblables, comme de la lumière dans le ciel, comme un jour dans les jours, comme moi partout. Moi, moi ! Je ne vois plus maintenant que la pâleur de ma figure, aux orbites profondes, enterrée dans le soir, et ma bouche pleine d’un silence qui doucement, mais sûrement, m’étouffe et m’anéantit. Je me soulève sur mon coude comme sur un moignon d’aile. Je voudrais qu’il m’arrivât quelque chose d’infini !

No hay más infierno que el furor de vivir.

Paradis: «Sì, questa è la guerra», ripete con voce remota, distante. «Nient’altro che questo». Capisco benissimo il senso delle sue parole. «Più delle cariche che sembrano parate, più delle battaglie visibili dispiegate come stendardi, più ancora dei corpo a corpo dove ci si dibatte e si grida, questa guerra è spaventosa e sovrumana fatica, è acqua fino al ventre, è fango, escrementi e infame sporcizia. È facce ammuffite e carni a brandelli, è cadaveri che non sembrano più nemmeno cadaveri, mentre galleggiano sulla terra famelica. È tutto questo, è questa miserabile monotonia interrotta da momenti drammatici; è questa, e non la baionetta scintillante come fosse d’argento, né il chicchirichì della tromba al sorgere del sole!»

...patriotism has become a narrow offensive sentiment which as long as it lives will maintain war and exhaust the world

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

Yo no sé lo que soy, ni adónde voy, ni lo que hago; pero, yo también he gritado desde el fondo de mi abismo, hacia un poco de luz.

You can no more look destiny in the face than you can look at the sun, and yet destiny is grey