Top 100 Jules Renard Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “The danger of success is that it makes us forget the world’s dreadful injustice.”

— Jules Renard

52. “To have a horror of the bourgeois is bourgeois.”

— Jules Renard

53. “I finally know what distinguishes man from the other beasts: financial worries.”

— Jules Renard

54. “There is a justice, but we do not always see it. Discreet, smiling, it is there, at one side, a little behind injustice, which makes a big noise.”

— Jules Renard

55. “The reward of great men is that, long after they have died, one is not quite sure that they are dead.”

— Jules Renard

56. “I have a remarkable memory; I forget everything. It is wonderfully convenient. It is as though the world were constantly renewing itself for me.”

— Jules Renard

57. “Those moments when you feel you want to read something truly beautiful. The eyes make a tour of the library, and there is nothing. Then you decide to take no matter what, and it is full of beautiful things.”

— Jules Renard

58. “Literature is an occupation in which you have to keep proving your talent to people who have none.”

— Jules Renard

59. “When the defects of others are perceived with so much clarity, it is because one possesses them oneself.”

— Jules Renard

60. “Life is what our character makes it. We fashion it, as a snail does its shell. A man can say: I never made a fortune because it is not in my character to be rich.”

— Jules Renard

61. “In the most complete friendship there is always a little empty space, like the space in an egg.”

— Jules Renard

62. “To think is not enough, you must think of something.”

— Jules Renard

63. “Writing is the only profession where no one considers you ridiculous if you earn no money.”

— Jules Renard

64. “Acting of some actors seems natural, because they have no talent.”

— Jules Renard

65. “God does not believe in our God.”

— Jules Renard

66. “How describe the delicate thing that happens when a brilliant insect alights on a flower? Words, with their weight, fall upon the picture like birds of prey.”

— Jules Renard

67. “In morals, always do as others do; in art, never.”

— Jules Renard

68. “Posterity! Why should people be less stupid tomorrow than they are today?”

— Jules Renard

69. “Truth makes many appeals, not the least of which is its power to shock.”

— Jules Renard

70. “I find that when I do not think of myself I do not think at all.”

— Jules Renard

71. “The story I am writing exists, written in absolutely perfect fashion, some place, in the air. All I must do is find it, and copy it.”

— Jules Renard

72. “Clarity is the politeness of the man of letters.”

— Jules Renard

73. “Socialism must come down from the brain and reach the heart.”

— Jules Renard

74. “Words are the coins making up the currency of sentences, and there are always too many small coins.”

— Jules Renard

75. “It astounds us to come upon other egoists, as though we alone had the right to be selfish, and to be filled with eagerness to live.”

— Jules Renard

76. “There is nothing like literature: I lose a cow, I write about her death, and my writing pays me enough to buy another cow.”

— Jules Renard

77. “Let us stay at home: there we are decent. Let us not go out: our defects wait for us at the door, like flies.”

— Jules Renard

78. “In literature, there are only oxen. The biggest ones are the geniuses-the ones who toil eighteen hours a day without tiring.”

— Jules Renard

79. “It is in the midst of the city that one writes the most inspiring pages about the country.”

— Jules Renard

80. “It is easy for a somebody to be modest, but it is difficult to be modest when one is a nobody.”

— Jules Renard

81. “A cold in the head causes less suffering than an idea.”

— Jules Renard

82. “The void yields up nothing. You have to be a great poet to make it ring.”

— Jules Renard

83. “An egotist always resents meeting another egotist as if he alone had the right to be one.”

— Jules Renard

84. “We are so happy to advise others that occasionally we even do it in their interest.”

— Jules Renard

85. “How many people have wanted to kill themselves, and have been content with tearing up their photograph!”

— Jules Renard

86. “You can recover from the writing malady only by falling mortally ill and dying.”

— Jules Renard

87. “The bourgeois are other people.”

— Jules Renard

88. “The horse is the only animal into which one can bang nails.”

— Jules Renard

89. “There are places and moments in which one is so completely alone that one sees the world entire.”

— Jules Renard

90. “An optimist is a driver who thinks that empty space at the curb won’t have a hydrant beside it.”

— Jules Renard

91. “The profession of letters is, after all, the only one in which one can make no money without being ridiculous.”

— Jules Renard

92. “Whenever I have talked to anyone at too great length, I am like a man who has drunk too much, and ashamed, doesn’t know where to put himself.”

— Jules Renard

93. “The peasant is the only species of human being who doesn’t like the country and never looks at it.”

— Jules Renard

94. “Somewhere in the shadow cast by every famous man is a feminine victim.”

— Jules Renard

95. “True courage consists in being courageous precisely when when we’re not.”

— Jules Renard

96. “We spend our lives talking about this mystery. Our life.”

— Jules Renard

97. “Art: to nudge truth along a little.”

— Jules Renard

98. “At the bottom of all patriotism there is war: that is why I am no patriot.”

— Jules Renard

99. “I am afraid I shall not find him, but I shall still look for him, for if he exists, he may be appreciative of my efforts.”

— Jules Renard

100. “I don’t claim to have taste, but of my distaste I am very sure .”

— Jules Renard