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Henri Barbusse Quotes
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Henri Barbusse was a French novelist and a member of the French Communist Party. He was a lifelong friend of Albert Einstein. Wikipedia  

✵ 17. May 1873 – 30. August 1935
Henri Barbusse photo
Henri Barbusse: 197   quotes 207   likes

Henri Barbusse Quotes

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

Henri Barbusse

The Inferno (1917), Ch. XVI
Context: We have the divinity of our great misery. And our solitude, with its toilsome ideas, tears and laughter, is fatally divine. However wrong we may go in the dark, whatever our efforts in the dark and the useless work of our hearts working incessantly, and 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. It is this sentiment that lights our foreheads, uplifts our souls, adorns our pride, and, in spite of everything, will console us when we shall become accustomed to holding, each at his own poor task, the whole place that God used to occupy. The truth itself gives an effective, practical, and, so to speak, religious caress to the suppliant in whom the heavens spread.

Idea , Solitude , Tear , Laughter

“The real presence of truth is not in every word of truth, because of the wear and tear of words, and the fleeting multiplicity of arguments. One must have the gift of persuasion, of leaving to truth its speaking simplicity, its solemn unfoldings.”

Henri Barbusse

Light (1919), Ch. XXII - Light
Context: It is not enough to speak; you must know words. When you have said, "I am in pain," or when you have said, "I am right," you have said nothing in reality, you have only spoken to yourself. The real presence of truth is not in every word of truth, because of the wear and tear of words, and the fleeting multiplicity of arguments. One must have the gift of persuasion, of leaving to truth its speaking simplicity, its solemn unfoldings. It is not I who will be able to speak from the depths of myself. The attention of men dazzles me when it rises before me. The very nakedness of paper frightens me and drowns my looks. Not I shall embellish that whiteness with writing like light. I understand of what a great tribune's sorrow is made; and I can only dream of him who, visibly summarizing the immense crisis of human necessity in a work which forgets nothing, which seems to forget nothing, without the blot even of a misplaced comma, will proclaim our Charter to the epochs of the times in which we are, and will let us see it. Blessed be that simplifier, from whatever country he may come, — but all the same, I should prefer him, at the bottom of my heart, to speak French.

Truth , Tear

“I think of myself, of all that I am. Myself, my home, my hours; the past, and the future, — it was going to be like the past!”

Henri Barbusse

Light (1919), Ch. XV - An Apparition
Context: I think of myself, of all that I am. Myself, my home, my hours; the past, and the future, — it was going to be like the past! And at that moment I feel, weeping within me and dragging itself from some little bygone trifle, a new and tragical sorrow in dying, a hunger to be warm once more in the rain and the cold: to enclose myself in myself in spite of space, to hold myself back, to live.

Home , Thinking , Past , Future

“I have heard the annunciation of whatever finer things are to come. Through me has passed, without staying me in my course, the Word which does not lie, and which, said over again, will satisfy.”

Henri Barbusse

The Inferno (1917), Ch. XVII
Context: What I have seen is going to disappear, since I shall do nothing with it. I am like a mother the fruit of whose womb will perish after it has been born.
What matter? I have heard the annunciation of whatever finer things are to come. Through me has passed, without staying me in my course, the Word which does not lie, and which, said over again, will satisfy.

Lie

“"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

The Inferno (1917), Ch. XVI

Truth

“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.”

Henri Barbusse

Light (1919), Ch. XXII - Light
Context: 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!

Drawing

“What am I? I am the desire not to die.”

Henri Barbusse

The Inferno (1917), Ch. XIV
Context: What am I? I am the desire not to die. I have always been impelled — not that evening alone — by the need to construct the solid, powerful dream that I shall never leave again. We are all, always, the desire not to die. This desire is as immeasurable and varied as life's complexity, but at bottom this is what it is: To continue to be, to be more and more, to develop and to endure. All the force we have, all our energy and clearness of mind serve to intensify themselves in one way or another. We intensify ourselves with new impressions, new sensations, new ideas. We endeavour to take what we do not have and to add it to ourselves. Humanity is the desire for novelty founded upon the fear of death. That is what it is.

“Between two masses of gloomy cloud a tranquil gleam emerges; and that line of light, so blackedged and beset, brings even so its proof that the sun is there.”

Henri Barbusse book Under Fire

Under Fire (1916), Ch. 24 - The Dawn
Context: While we get ready to rejoin the others and begin war again, the dark and storm-choked sky slowly opens above our heads. Between two masses of gloomy cloud a tranquil gleam emerges; and that line of light, so blackedged and beset, brings even so its proof that the sun is there.

Light , Sun

“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 book Under Fire

Under Fire (1916), Ch. 24 - The Dawn

Night

“Defeated, I followed my impulse casually. I followed a woman who had been watching me from her corner. Then we walked side by side. We said a few words; she took me home with her. Then I went through the banal scene. It passed like a sudden hurtling–down. Again, I am on the pavement and I am not at peace as I had hoped. An immense confusion bewilders me. It is as if I could not see things as they were. I see too deep and too much.”

Henri Barbusse

As translated by John Rodker
The Inferno (1917)

Peace , Hope , Home

“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

Light (1919), Ch. XIX - Ghosts

Thinking

“Afterwards they did as the others had done, as human beings always do, as they themselves would do many times again in the strange future — they sat with their eyes half-closed and the same uneasy look of shame and terror in them as Amy and her lover.
But these two required no artificial stimulus for their love. They had no need of the night. And they felt no culpability. They were two grand young creatures, driven together naturally by the very force of their love, and their ardour cleansed everything, like fire. They were innocent. They had no regrets and felt no remorse. They thought they were united.”

Henri Barbusse

The Inferno (1917), Ch. XV

Love , Lovers , Nature , Time

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

Henri Barbusse

Light (1919), Ch. XXII - Light

People

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

Henri Barbusse book Under Fire

Under Fire (1916), Ch. 1 - The Vision

War , World , Disease

“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

Light (1919), Ch. XVI - De Profundis Clamavi

Heart

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

Henri Barbusse

Light (1919), Ch. XXIII - Face To Face

Memory

“I am like a poet on the threshold of a work, an accursed, sterile poet who will leave no glory behind, to whom chance lent the truth that genius would have given him, a frail work which will pass away with me, mortal and sealed to others like myself, but a sublime work nevertheless, which will show the essential outlines of life and relate the drama of dramas.”

Henri Barbusse

The Inferno (1917), Ch. XIV

Life , Truth , Chance

“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

Light (1919), Ch. XVI - De Profundis Clamavi

Water

“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."”

Henri Barbusse

"It's love!" Marie answers.
Light (1919), Ch. XXIII - Face To Face

Love

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

Henri Barbusse

Light (1919), Ch. XXIII - Face To Face

“I am frozen by a mass which supports me. My elbow sinks into it. It is the horse's belly; its rigid leg obliquely bars the narrow circle from which my eyes cannot escape. Ah, it is dead! It seems to me that my breast is empty, yet still there is an echo in my heart. What I am looking for is life.”

Henri Barbusse

Light (1919), Ch. XV - An Apparition

Life , Support , Heart , Horse

“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

Light (1919), Ch. XVI - De Profundis Clamavi

Men , Truth , World

“Night fell. I looked for a word like mine, a word to lean upon, a word to sustain me. And it seemed to me that I was going along groping my way as if expecting some one to come from round the corner and tell me everything.”

Henri Barbusse

The Inferno (1917), Ch. XVI

Way , Night

“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

Light (1919), Ch. XXII - Light

Country

“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

Light (1919), Ch. XIX - Ghosts

Love , Summer

“"We shall say to ourselves," says one, "'After all, why do we make war?' We don't know at all why, but we can say who we make it for. We shall be forced to see that if every nation every day brings the fresh bodies of fifteen hundred young men to the God of War to be lacerated, it's for the pleasure of a few ringleaders that we could easily count; that if whole nations go to slaughter marshaled in armies in order that the gold-striped caste may write their princely names in history, so that other gilded people of the same rank can contrive more business, and expand in the way of employees and shops — and we shall see, as soon as we open our eyes, that the divisions between mankind are not what we thought, and those one did believe in are not divisions."”

Henri Barbusse book Under Fire

Under Fire (1916), Ch. 24 - The Dawn

Men , God , War , People

“"Men must not awake," the shining shadow goes on, in dull and hollow tones.
"Don't worry!" says the ironical voice, and at that moment it terrifies me.
Several bodies arise on their fists into the darkness — I see them by their heavy groans — and look around them.
The shadow talks to himself and repeats his insane words: —
"Men must not awake."
The voice opposite me, capsizing in laughter and swollen with a rattle, says again: —
"Don't worry!"”

Henri Barbusse

Light (1919), Ch. XIV - The Ruins

Men , Laughter

“"I have confidence in the abyss of the people."
And those words stabbed me to the heart and dilated my eyes with horror, for it seemed to me suddenly, in a flash, that he understood what he was saying!”

Henri Barbusse

Light (1919), Ch. XIV - The Ruins

People , Confidence , Heart

“Quite near, one face is looking sadly at me, as it lolls to one side. It is coming out of the bottom of the heap, as a wild animal might. Its hair falls back like nails. The nose is a triangular hole and a little of the whiteness of human marble dots it. There are no lips left, and the two rows of teeth show up like lettering. The cheeks are sprinkled with moldy traces of beard. This body is only mud and stones. This face, in front of my own, is only a consummate mirror.”

Henri Barbusse

Light (1919), Ch. XV - An Apparition

Animals

“This is the subject," said Pierre Villiers. "It gives me scope to amuse and tell the truth at the same time. A man pierces a hole in the wall of a boarding-house room, and watches what is going on in the next room.”

Henri Barbusse

The Inferno (1917), Ch. XVI

Truth , Time , Housing

“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

Light (1919), Ch. XVI - De Profundis Clamavi

Animals

“"They will say to you," growled a kneeling man who stooped with his two bands in the earth and shook his shoulders like a mastiff, 'My friend, you have been a wonderful hero!' I don't want them to say it!
"Heroes? Some sort of extraordinary being? Idols? Rot! We've been murderers. We have respectably followed the trade of hangmen. We shall do it again with all our might, because it's of great importance to follow that trade, so as to punish war and smother it. The act of slaughter is always ignoble; sometimes necessary, but always ignoble. Yes, hard and persistent murderers, that's what we've been. But don't talk to me about military virtue because I've killed Germans."
"Nor to me," cried another in so loud a voice that no one could have replied to him even had he dared; "nor to me, because I've saved the lives of Frenchmen! Why, we might as well set fire to houses for the sake of the excellence of life-saving!"”

Henri Barbusse book Under Fire

Under Fire (1916), Ch. 24 - The Dawn

Life , War , Housing

“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

Light (1919), Ch. XXIII - Face To Face

Love

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

Henri Barbusse book Under Fire

Variant translation: Two armies that fight each other is like one large army that commits suicide.
Under Fire (1916), Ch. 1 - The Vision

Death , Suicide

“They are not only the warrior caste who shout as they fight and have joy of it, not only those whom universal slavery has clothed in magic power, the mighty by birth, who tower here and there above the prostration of the human race and will take their sudden stand by the scales of justice when they think they see great profit to gain; not only these, but whole multitudes who minister consciously or unconsciously to their fearful privilege.
"There are those who say," now cries one of the somber and compelling talkers, extending his hand as though he could see the pageant, "there are those who say, 'How fine they are!'"
"And those who say, 'The nations hate each other!'"
"And those who say, 'I get fat on war, and my belly matures on it!'"
"And those who say, 'There has always been war, so there always will be!'"
"There are those who say, 'I can't see farther than the end of my nose, and I forbid others to see farther!'."”

Henri Barbusse book Under Fire

Under Fire (1916), Ch. 24 - The Dawn

Hate , War , Fear , Justice

“"It would be a crime to exhibit the fine side of war, even if there were one!" murmured one of the somber soldiers.
The first man continued. "They'll say those things to us by way of paying us with glory, and to pay themselves, too, for what they haven't done. But military glory — it isn't even true for us common soldiers. It's for some, but outside those elect the soldier's glory is a lie, like every other fine-looking thing in war. In reality, the soldier's sacrifice is obscurely concealed. The multitudes that make up the waves of attack have no reward. They run to hurl themselves into a frightful inglorious nothing. You cannot even heap up their names, their poor little names of nobodies."”

Henri Barbusse book Under Fire

Under Fire (1916), Ch. 24 - The Dawn

War , Lie , Way , Reality

“She had fallen asleep with her head on her lover's knees. He looked at her and smiled. An expression of pity and benevolence flitted across his face. His hands stretched out part way toward the sleeping woman with the gentleness of strength. I saw the glorious pride of condescension and charity in this man whom a woman prostrate before him deified.”

Henri Barbusse

The Inferno (1917), Ch. XVI

Smile , Way , Lovers , Sleep

“"Put an end to war?" say the watchers. — "Forbid the Storm!"
Cleansed from the passions of party and faction, liberated from prejudice and infatuation and the tyranny of tradition, these watchers on the threshold of another world are vaguely conscious of the simplicity of the present and the yawning possibilities of the future.”

Henri Barbusse book Under Fire

Under Fire (1916), Ch. 1 - The Vision

War , World , Passion , Future

“The streaming plain, seamed and seared with long parallel canals and scooped into water-holes, is an immensity, and these castaways who strive to exhume themselves from it are legion. But the thirty million slaves, hurled upon one another in the mud of war by guilt and error, uplift their human faces and reveal at last a bourgeoning Will. The future is in the hands of these slaves, and it is clearly certain that the alliance to be cemented some day by those whose number and whose misery alike are infinite will transform the old world.”

Henri Barbusse book Under Fire

Under Fire (1916), Ch. 1 - The Vision

War , World , Error , Water

“War!
Some of the invalids break the silence, and say the word again under their breath, reflecting that this is the greatest happening of the age, and perhaps of all ages. Even on the lucid landscape at which they gaze the news casts something like a vague and somber mirage.”

Henri Barbusse book Under Fire

Under Fire (1916), Ch. 1 - The Vision

War , Age , Silence

“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

Light (1919), Ch. XX The Cult

Selfishness

“"You've done well to say all that! Yes, it is always easy to lie for a moment. You might have lied, but it would have been worse when we woke up from the lies. It's a reward to talk. Perhaps it's the only reward there is."
She said that profoundly, right to the bottom of my heart.”

Henri Barbusse

Light (1919), Ch. XXIII - Face To Face

Lie , Heart

“Suddenly I am pushed by a movement of the horse on which I am lying. I see that he has turned his great head aside; he is mournfully eating grass. I saw this horse but lately in the middle of the regiment — I know him by the white in his mane — rearing and whinnying like the true battle-chargers; and now, broken somewhere, he is silent as the truly unhappy are.”

Henri Barbusse

Light (1919), Ch. XIV - The Ruins

Lying , Grass , Horse

“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

The Inferno (1917), Ch. XVI

People , Truth , Error , Thinking

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

Henri Barbusse

Light (1919), XVII - Morning

Sleep

“And he continued to travesty the truth, and I was impotent — the truth, that profound thing whose voice was in my ears, whose shadow was in my eyes, and whose taste was in my mouth.
Was I so utterly forsaken? Would no one speak the word I was in search of?”

Henri Barbusse

The Inferno (1917), Ch. XVI

Truth , Search

“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

Light (1919), Ch. XXII - Light

Nature

“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

Light (1919), Ch. XXIII - Face To Face

Life , Hunger , Cry , Sincerity

“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

The Inferno (1917), Ch. XVI

World , Search