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Henri Barbusse

159 quotes

“All is accomplished, all has terminated there. It is there, in that circle narrow as a well that the descent into the raging heart of hell was halted, the descent into slow tortures, into unrelenting fatigue, into the flashing tempest. We came here because they told us to come here. We have done what they told us to do. I think of the simplicity of our reply on the Day of Judgment.”
Henri Barbusse (1873–1935) said by 1935 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Through centuries of centuries, fire and water face each other; the fire, upright, buoyant and leaping; the water flat, creeping, gliding, widening its lines and its surface. When they touch, is it the water which hisses and roars, or is it the fire?”
Henri Barbusse (1873–1935) said by 1935 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“When two overlords, jewel-set with glittering General Staffs, proclaim at the same time on either side of their throbbing mobilized frontiers, "We will save our country!" there is one immensity deceived and two victimized. There are two deceived immensities! There is nothing else. That these cries can be uttered together in the face of heaven, in the face of truth, proves at a stroke the monstrosity of the laws which rule us, and the madness of the gods.”
Henri Barbusse (1873–1935) said by 1935 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“War will come again after this one. It will come again as long as it can be determined by people other than those who fight. The same causes will produce the same effects, and the living will have to give up all hope.”
Henri Barbusse (1873–1935) said by 1935 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We may no longer be able to count; but Fate will count. Some day the men will be killed, and the women and children. And they also will disappear — they who stand erect upon the ignominious death of the soldiers, — they will disappear along with the huge and palpitating pedestal in which they were rooted. But they profit by the present, they believe it will last as long as they, and as they follow each other they say, "After us, the deluge." Some day all war will cease for want of fighters.”
Henri Barbusse (1873–1935) said by 1935 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“All is madness. And there is no one who will dare to rise and say that all is not madness, and that the future does not so appear — as fatal and unchangeable as a memory. But how many men will there be who will dare, in face of the universal deluge which will be at the end as it was in the beginning, to get up and cry "No!" who will pronounce the terrible and irrefutable issue: — "No! The interests of the people and the interests of all their present overlords are not the same.”
Henri Barbusse (1873–1935) said by 1935 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1873–1935) said by 1935 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There have been those who magnificently dared. There have been bearers of the truth, men who groped in the world's tumult, trying to make plain order of it. They discover what we did not yet know; chiefly they discover what we no longer knew.”
Henri Barbusse (1873–1935) said by 1935 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Truth is simple. They who say that truth is complicated deceive themselves, and the truth is not in them.”
Henri Barbusse (1873–1935) said by 1935 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1873–1935) said by 1935 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1873–1935) said by 1935 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I went to sleep in Chaos, and then I awoke like the first man.”
Henri Barbusse (1873–1935) said by 1935 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Instinctively we both looked for the inscriptions we cut, once upon a time, on trees and on stones, in foolish delight. We sought them like scattered treasure, on the strange cheeks of the old willows, near the tendrils of the fall, on the birches that stand like candles in front of the violet thicket, and on the old fir which so often sheltered us with its dark wings. Many inscriptions have disappeared. Some are worn away because things do; some are covered by a host of other inscriptions or they are distorted and ugly. Nearly all have passed on as if they had been passers-by.”
Henri Barbusse (1873–1935) said by 1935 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We do not speak. We have gone down along the side of the river — slowly, as if we were climbing — towards the stone seat of the wall. The distances have altered. This seat, for instance, we meet it sooner than we thought we should, like some one in the dark; but it is the seat all right. The rose-tree which grew above it has withered away and become a crown of thorns.”
Henri Barbusse (1873–1935) said by 1935 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I have put my arm round her waist, and I am shaken by the sorrow which agitates her chest and throat, and sometimes shakes her rudely, the sorrow which does not belong to me, which belongs to no one, and is like a divinity.”
Henri Barbusse (1873–1935) said by 1935 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1873–1935) said by 1935 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In those former times we lived. Now we hardly live any more, since we have lived. They who we were are dead, for we are here. Her glances come to me, but they do not join again the two surviving voids that we are; her look does not wipe out our widowhood, nor change anything. And I, I am too imbued with clear-sighted simplicity and truth to answer "no" when it is "yes." In this moment by my side Marie is like me. The immense mourning of human hearts appears to us. We dare not name it yet; but we dare not let it not appear in all that we say.”
Henri Barbusse (1873–1935) said by 1935 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Once, when she was looking at me distressfully, she murmured, "You — you've no more illusion at all. I pity you!" At that moment, within the space of a flash, she was thinking of me only, and she pities me! She has found something in her grief to give me.”
Henri Barbusse (1873–1935) said by 1935 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We go back home. We wait and then have dinner. We live these few hours. And we see ourselves alone in the house, facing each other, as never we saw ourselves, and we do not know what to do! It is a real drama of vacancy which is breaking loose. We are living together; our movements are in harmony, they touch and mingle. But all of it is empty. We do not long for each other, we can no longer expect each other, we have no dreams, we are not happy. It is a sort of imitation of life by phantoms, by beings who, in the distance are beings, but close by — so close — are phantoms!”
Henri Barbusse (1873–1935) said by 1935 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“She goes into her room and disappears. Before I went to the war we slept in the same bed. We used to lie down side by side, so as to be annihilated in unconsciousness, or to go and dream somewhere else. Commonplace life has shipwrecks worse than in Shakespearean dramas. For man and wife — to sleep, to die.) But since I came back we separate ourselves with a wall.”
Henri Barbusse (1873–1935) said by 1935 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It is not yet hostility around me; but it is already a rupture. With this truth that clings to me alone, amid the world and its phantoms, am I not indeed rushing into a sort of tragedy impossible to maintain? They who surround me, filled to the lips, filled to the eyes, with the gross acceptance which turns men into beasts, they look at me mistrustfully, ready to be let loose against me.”
Henri Barbusse (1873–1935) said by 1935 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“My spirit is no longer what it was. Vaguely I seek, everywhere. I must see things with all their consequences, and right to their source. Against all the chains of facts I must have long arguments to bring; and the world's chaos requires an interpretation equally terrible.”
Henri Barbusse (1873–1935) said by 1935 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There must be justice, not charity. Kindness is solitary. Compassion becomes one with him whom we pity; it allows us to fathom him, to understand him alone amongst the rest; but it blurs and befogs the laws of the whole. I must set off with a clear idea, like the beam of a lighthouse through the deformities and temptations of night.”
Henri Barbusse (1873–1935) said by 1935 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The idea of motherland is not a false idea, but it is a little idea, and one which must remain little. There is only one common good. There is only one moral duty, only one truth, and every man is the shining recipient and guardian of it. The present understanding of the idea of motherland divides all these great ideas, cuts them into pieces, specializes them within impenetrable circles. We meet as many national truths as we do nations, and as many national duties, and as many national interests and rights — and they are antagonistic to each other.”
Henri Barbusse (1873–1935) said by 1935 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1873–1935) said by 1935 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The revelation still seems to me so terrible that the silence of men, heaped under the roofs down there at my feet, seizes and threatens me. And if I am but timidly formulating it within myself, that is because each of us has lived in reality more than his life, and because my training has filled me, like the rest, with centuries of shadow, of humiliation and captivity. It is establishing itself cautiously; but it is the truth, and there are moments when logic seizes you in its godlike whirlwind.”
Henri Barbusse (1873–1935) said by 1935 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Tradition reigns, the gospel of the blind adoration of what was and what is — God without a head. Man's destiny is eternally blockaded by two forms of tradition; in time, by hereditary succession; in space, by frontiers, and thus it is crushed and annihilated in detail. It is the truth. I am certain of it, for I am touching it.”
Henri Barbusse (1873–1935) said by 1935 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Ah, 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.”
Henri Barbusse (1873–1935) said by 1935 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1873–1935) said by 1935 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The eye is lost in all directions among the desolation where the multitude of men and women are hiding, as always and as everywhere. That is what is. Who will say, "That is what must be!" I have searched, I have indistinctly seen, I have doubted. Now, I hope.”
Henri Barbusse (1873–1935) said by 1935 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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?”
Henri Barbusse (1873–1935) said by 1935 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Speech perpetuates vision. We carry no light; we are things of shadow, for night closes our eyes, and we put out our hands to find our way when the light is gone; we only shine in speech; truth is made by the mouths of men. The wind of words — what is it? It is our breath — not all words, for there are artificial and copied ones which are not part of the speaker; but the profound words, the cries. In the human cry you feel the effort of the spring. The cry comes out of us, it is as living as a child. The cry goes on, and makes the appeal of truth wherever it may be, the cry gathers cries.”
Henri Barbusse (1873–1935) said by 1935 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Let us spell out the Magna Charta of which we humbly catch sight. Let us say to the people of whom all peoples are made: "Wake up and understand, look and see; and having begun again the consciousness which was mown down by slavery, decide that everything must be begun again!”
Henri Barbusse (1873–1935) said by 1935 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Unless they are universal, the reforms to be carried out are utopian and mortal. National reforms are only fragments of reforms. There must be no half measures. Half measures are laughter-provoking in their unbounded littleness when it is a question for the last time of arresting the world's roll down the hill of horror. There must be no half measures because there are no half truths. Do all, or you will do nothing.”
Henri Barbusse (1873–1935) said by 1935 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“He who would dig right down to the truth must simplify; his faith must be brutally simple, or he is lost. Laugh at the subtle shades and distinctions of the rhetoricians and the specialist physicians. Say aloud: "This is what is," and then, "That is what must be.”
Henri Barbusse (1873–1935) said by 1935 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Socially, women are the equals of men, without restrictions. The beings who shine and who bring forth are not made solely to lend or to give the heat of their bodies. It is right that the sum total of work should be shared, reduced and harmonized by their hands. It is just that the fate of humanity should be grounded also in the strength of women.”
Henri Barbusse (1873–1935) said by 1935 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The so-called inseparable cohesions of national interests vanish away as soon as you draw near to examine them. There are individual interests and a general interest, those two only. When you say "I," it means "I"; when you say "We," it means Man. So long as a single and identical Republic does not cover the world, all national liberations can only be beginnings and signals!”
Henri Barbusse (1873–1935) said by 1935 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1873–1935) said by 1935 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Let everything be remade on simple lines. There is only one people, there is only one people!”
Henri Barbusse (1873–1935) said by 1935 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1873–1935) said by 1935 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We are in a great night of the world. The thing is to know if we shall wake up to-morrow. We have only one succor — we know of what the night is made. But shall we be able to impart our lucid faith, seeing that the heralds of warning are everywhere few, and that the greatest victims hate the only ideal which is not one, and call it utopian?”
Henri Barbusse (1873–1935) said by 1935 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Henri Barbusse (1873–1935) said by 1935 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I proclaim the inevitable advent of the universal republic. Not the transient backslidings, nor the darkness and the dread, nor the tragic difficulty of uplifting the world everywhere at once will prevent the fulfillment of international truth.”
Henri Barbusse (1873–1935) said by 1935 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“That society is badly arranged which forces nearly all women to be servants. Marie, who is as good as I am, will have spent her life in cleaning, in stooping amid dust and hot fumes, over head and ears in the great artificial darkness of the house. I used to find it all natural. Now I think it is all anti-natural.”
Henri Barbusse (1873–1935) said by 1935 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I hear no more sounds. Marie has finished. She comes up beside me. We have sought each other and come together as often as possible since the day when we saw so clearly that we no longer loved each other!”
Henri Barbusse (1873–1935) said by 1935 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“She sighs for the thought she has. She would like to be silent, but she must speak. "We don't love each other any more," she says, embarrassed by the greatness of the things she utters; "but we did once, and I want to see our love again.”
Henri Barbusse (1873–1935) said by 1935 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“All that we can remember is almost nothing. Memory is greater than we are, but memory is living and mortal as well.”
Henri Barbusse (1873–1935) said by 1935 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1873–1935) said by 1935 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“For some moments there had been outlined within me the tragic shape of the cry which at last came forth. It was a sort of madness of sincerity and simplicity which seized me. And I, unveiling my life to her, though it slid away by the side of hers, all my life, with its failings and its coarseness. I let her see me in my desires, in my hungers, in my entrails.”
Henri Barbusse (1873–1935) said by 1935 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Two sensuous lovers are not two friends. Much rather are they two enemies, closely attached to each other. I know it, I know it! There are perfect couples, no doubt — perfection always exists somewhere — but I mean us others, all of us, the ordinary people! I know! — the human being's real quality, the delicate lights and shadows of human dreams, the sweet and complicated mystery of personalities, sensuous lovers deride them, both of them! They are two egoists, falling fiercely on each other. Together they sacrifice themselves, utterly in a flash of pleasure.”
Henri Barbusse (1873–1935) said by 1935 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source