Henri Barbusse Quotes

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 keep remembering "” I keep remembering. My heart has no pity on me.

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

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."

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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?