Quotes from Henri Barbusse

We catch only glimpses of life. Death is the one thing we really have time to see. A day is coming when I shall be no more. I am crying because I shall surely die.

Like all human beings, like me, like us, they wished for what they did not have. "I am alone and I want what I have not and what I shall never have." It is by this need that people live, and by this need that people die.

But time did not stand still, and now we scarcely love each other." I am thinking,' you said, 'that this moment will never come again. I am thinking that you are going to change, to die, and go away. I am thinking so truly, so hotly, how precious these moments are, how precious you are, you who will never again be just what you are now, This is the wound--time, which passes and changes us. To grow old, to think differently, to die.

I was young and strong then, full of hope and full of the beginning of things. I thought I was going to conquer the world, and even had the choice of the means to conquer it. Alas, all I did was to cross hastily over its surface.

And night came, as every night will come, until the last one, which will be too vast. There is no hell, no inferno except the frenzy of living The last cry, as it was the first.

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.

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.

La primera mirada es tan imposible de conocer como la última.

Estamos crucificados; no como Dios, que lo fue en carne sobre una cruz, sino que estamos crucificados sobre el tiempo y el espacio.

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.

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

I keep remembering — I keep remembering. My heart has no pity on me.

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 memory of you saddened my joys, but consoled my sorrows.

I love you, but I love the past even more. I long for it, I long for it, I am consumed with longing for it. The past! I shall cry, I shall suffer because the past will never come back again.

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

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.

It is not by sin that we attain happiness, nor is it by virtue, nor is it by that kind of divine fire by which one makes great instinctive decisions and which is neither good not evil. It is by none of these things that one reaches happiness. One never reaches happiness.

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.

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

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

I saw that they wanted to kill the past. When we are old, we let it die; when we are young and strong, we kill it.

There is an attraction for you which does not exist for me, since I do not feel any pleasure. You see, we are making a bargain. You give me a dream, I give you joy. But all this is not love.