Henri Barbusse citations

Page 5

“Le réel et le surnaturel, c’est la même chose.”

“L'avenir est dans les mains des esclaves, et on voit bien que le vieux monde sera changé par l'alliance que bâtiront un jour entre eux ceux dont le nombre et la misère sont infinis.”

“On ne meurt pas puisqu’on est seul; ce sont les autres qui meurent. Et cette phrase qui se répand en tremblant à mes lèvres, à la fois sinistre et radieuse, annonce que la mort est un faux dieu.”

“Combien de crimes dont ils ont fait des vertus, en les appelant nationales!”

“Si on nous enlevait tout ce qui nous fait mal, que resterait-il?”

“Ce serait un crime de montrer les beaux côtés de la guerre, même s'il y en avait!”

“La liberté et la fraternité sont des mots, tandis que l'égalité est une chose.”

“Chaque être est toute la vérité.”

“À l’ulcère du monde, il y a une grande cause générale. Vous l’avez nommée : c’est l’asservissement au passé, le préjugé séculaire, qui empêche de tout refaire proprement, selon la raison et la morale. L’esprit de tradition infecte l’humanité.”

“Deux armées aux prises, c'est une grande armée qui se suicide.”

“Chaque être est seul au monde. Cela paraît absurde, contradictoire, d’énoncer une phrase pareille. Et pourtant, il en est ainsi… Mais il y a plusieurs êtres comme moi… Non, on ne peut pas dire cela. Pour dire cela, on se place à côté de la vérité en une sorte d’abstraction. On ne peut dire qu’une chose : Je suis seul.”

“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 !”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“Animals are innocence incarnate. This horse is like an enormous child, and if one wanted to point out life's innocence face to face, one would have to typify, not a little child, but a horse.”

“It is simply the truth which has come to our aid. It is truth which has given us life. Affection is the greatest of human feelings because it is made of respect, of lucidity, and light. To understand the truth and make one's self equal to it is everything; and to love is the same thing as to know and to understand. Affection, which I call also compassion, because I see no difference between them, dominates everything by reason of its clear sight. It is a sentiment as immense as if it were mad, and yet it is wise, and of human things it is the only perfect one. There is no great sentiment which is not completely held on the arms of compassion.”

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

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

“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.”

“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?”

“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."”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Once, after we had recalled to each other an enchanted summer evening, I said, "We loved each other," and she answered, "I remember."”

“"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."”

“Marie falls back upon her idea, obdurately, and says, "A woman only lives by love and for love. When she's no longer good for that she's no longer anything."
She repeats, "You see — I'm nothing any more."
Ah, she is at the bottom of her abyss! She is at the extremity of a woman's mourning! She is not thinking only of me. Her thought is higher and vaster. She is thinking of all the woman she is, of all that love is, of all possible things when she says, "I'm no longer anything." And I — I am only he who is present with her just now, and no help whatever is left her to look for from any one.
I should like to pacify and console this woman who is gentleness and simplicity and who is sinking there while she lightly touches me with her presence — but exactly because she is there I cannot lie to her, I can do nothing against her grief, her perfect, infallible grief.
"Ah!" she cries, "if we came to life again!"”

“I stood still, a prey to a thousand thoughts, stifled in the robe of the evening.”

“I lifted my glass to my lips when suddenly I stopped and felt all my blood rush to my heart.
This is what I heard:
"What's the theme of the novel you're working on?"
"Truth," replied Pierre Villiers.
"What?" exclaimed his friend.
"A succession of human beings caught just as they are."”

“"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!"”

“"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!”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Perhaps because of my fever, perhaps because of my lofty pain, I imagine that some one there is declaiming a great poem, that some one is speaking of Prometheus. He has stolen light from the gods. In his entrails he feels the pain, always beginning again, always fresh, gathering from evening to evening, when the vulture steals to him as it would steal to its nest. And you feel that we are all like Prometheus because of desire, but there is neither vulture nor gods.
There is no paradise except that which we create in the great tomb of the churches. There is no hell, no inferno except the frenzy of living.
There is no mysterious fire. I have stolen the truth. I have stolen the whole truth. I have seen sacred things, tragic things, pure things, and I was right. I have seen shameful things, and I was right. And so I have entered the kingdom of truth, if, while preserving respect to truth and without soiling it, we can use the expression that deceit and religious blasphemy employ.”

“"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!"”

“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!”