Quotes from Muriel Barbery

If you want to heal Heal othersAnd smile or weepAt this happy reversal of fate

To beauty, all is forgiven, even vulgarity. Intelligence no longer seems an adequate compensation for things.

If you want to heal Heal others And smile or weep At this very happy reversal of fate

...what I dread more than anything else in this life is noise...silence helps you to go inward..anyone who is interested in something more than just life outside actually needs silence.

'Life has meaning and we grown-ups know what it is' is the universal lie that everyone is supposed to believe. Once you become an adult and you realize that's not true, it's too late.

How to measure a life's worth? The important thing, said Paloma one day, is not the fact of dying, it is what you are doing in the moment of your death.

Music plays a huge role in my life. It is music that helps me to endure ... well ... everything there is to endure.

Because art is life, playing to other rhythms.

People think that children don't know anything. It's enough to make you wonder if grownups were ever children once upon a time.

When someone that you love dies..it's like fireworks suddenly burning out in the sky and everything going black.

With the exception of love, friendship and the beauty of Art, I don't see much else that can nurture human life.

The real ordeal is not leaving those you love but learning to live without those who don't love you.

There's so much humanity in a love of trees, so much nostalgia for our first sense of wonder, so much power in just feeling our own insignificance when we are surrounded by nature.

As far as I can see, only psychoanalysis can compete with Christians in their love of drawn-out suffering.

I may know that the world is an ugly place, I still don't want to see it.

A man who farts in bed . . . is a man who loves life.

shocked to realize how much vitality is required simply to support our primitive requirements, we wonder, bewildered, where Art fits in.

Tasting is an act of pleasure and writing about that pleasure is an artistic gesture, but the only true work of art, in the end, is another person's feast.

To the rich, therefore, falls the burden of Beauty. And if they cannot assume it, then they deserve to die.

Because beauty consists of its own passing, just as we reach for it. It's the ephemeral configuration of things in the moment, when you can see both their beauty and their death.

Yes, our eyes may perceive, yet they do not observe; they may believe, yet they do not question; they may receive yet they do not search: they are emptied of desire, with neither hunger nor passion.

Art is emotion without desire.

I thought: pity the poor in spirit who know neither the enchantment nor the beauty of language.