Top 120 Michel Houellebecq Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “When we think about the present, we veer wildly between the belief in chance and the evidence in favour of determinism. When we think about the past, however, it seems obvious that everything happened in the way that it was intended.”

— Michel Houellebecq

52. “I was about as political as a bath towel.”

— Michel Houellebecq

53. “Were they ready to give up everything for their country? I felt ready to give up everything, not really for my country, but in general.”

— Michel Houellebecq

54. “Historically, such human beings have existed. Human beings who have worked – worked hard – all their lives with no other motive than their love and devotion; who have literally given their lives for others, out of love and devotion. Human beings who have no sense of having made any sacrifice; who cannot imagine any other way of life than giving their lives for others – out of love and devotion. In general, such human beings are invariably women.”

— Michel Houellebecq

55. “But only literature can put you in touch with another human spirit, as a whole, with all its weaknesses and grandeurs, its limitations, its pettinesses, its obsessions, its beliefs; with whatever it finds moving, interesting, exciting, or repugnant.”

— Michel Houellebecq

56. “Even in our deepest, most lasting friendships, we never speak as openly as when we face a blank page and address a reader we do not know.”

— Michel Houellebecq

57. “I think it’s more difficult to live without a religion, definitely.”

— Michel Houellebecq

58. “What would it be like when I was fifty, sixty, older? I’d be no more than a jumble of organs in slow decomposition.”

— Michel Houellebecq

59. “Men in general don’t know how to live: they have no true familiarity with life, and never feel entirely at ease in it, so they pursue different projects, more or less ambitious and more or less grandiose – generally speaking, of course, they fail and reach the conclusion that they would have been better off just living, but as a rule by that point it’s too late.”

— Michel Houellebecq

60. “There was no way I could think it over without a second Calvados. After thinking it over, I decided that the really prudent thing was to go out and buy another bottle.”

— Michel Houellebecq

61. “The whole point of bureaucracy is to reduce the possibilities of your life to the greatest possible degree when it doesn’t simply succeed in destroying them; from the bureaucratic point of view, a good citizen is a dead citizen.”

— Michel Houellebecq

62. “The past is always beautiful. So, for that matter, is the future. Only the present hurts, and we carry it around like an abscess of suffering, our compassion between two infinities of happiness and peace.”

— Michel Houellebecq

63. “On Sunday morning I went out for a while in the neighbourhood; I bought some raisin bread. The day was warm but a little sad, as Sundays often are in Paris, especially when one doesn’t believe in God.”

— Michel Houellebecq

64. “In contemporary Western society, death is like white noise to a man in good health; it fills his mind when his dreams and plans fade. With age, the noise becomes increasingly insistent, like a dull roar with the occasional screech. In another age the sound meant waiting for the kingdom of God; it is now an anticipation of death. Such is life.”

— Michel Houellebecq

65. “All I knew was that once again I found myself alone, with even less desire to live and nothing to look forward to but aggravations.”

— Michel Houellebecq

66. “It’s hard to understand other people, to know what’s hidden in their hearts, and without the assistance of alcohol it might never be done at all.”

— Michel Houellebecq

67. “Unhappiness isn’t at its most acute point until a realistic chance of happiness, sufficiently close, has been envisioned.”

— Michel Houellebecq

68. “And I no longer even know where the source is; at present, everything looks the same. The landscape is more and more gentle, amiable, joyous; my skin hurts. I am at the heart of the abyss. I feel my skin again as a frontier, and the external world as a crushing weight. The impression of separation is total; from now on I am imprisoned within myself. It will not take place, the sublime fusion; the goal of life is missed. It is two in the afternoon.”

— Michel Houellebecq

69. “It’s submission,” Rediger murmured. “The shocking and simple idea, which had never been so forcefully expressed, that the summit of human happiness resides in the most absolute submission.”

— Michel Houellebecq

70. “The academic study of literature leads basically nowhere, as we all know, unless you happen to be an especially gifted student, in which case it prepares you for a career teaching the academic study of literature – it is, in other words, a rather farcical system that exists solely to replicate itself and yet manages to fail more than 95 percent of the time.”

— Michel Houellebecq

71. “Now abideth beauty, truth, and intensity; but the greatest of these is intensity.”

— Michel Houellebecq

72. “A reactionary is someone who wants to return to a previous state – that’s never a possibility in my books. For me, everything’s irreversible in the life of a society, as well as an individual’s.”

— Michel Houellebecq

73. “For the first time in my life I’d started thinking about God, seriously imagining that there could be a kind of Creator of the universe observing everything I did, and my first reaction was uncomplicated, pure and simple fear.”

— Michel Houellebecq

74. “Undoubtedly, the best way for a consumer to have a good time in the 2010s was to turn to Korean products: for a car, Kia and Hyundai; for electronics, LG and Samsung.”

— Michel Houellebecq

75. “Happy are those who are satisfied by life, who amuse themselves, who are content.”

— Michel Houellebecq

76. “Like literature, music can overwhelm you with sudden emotion, can move you to absolute sorrow or ecstasy; like literature, painting has the power to astonish, and to make you see the world through fresh eyes. But only literature can put you in touch with another human spirit, as a whole, with all its weaknesses and grandeurs, its limitations, its pettinesses, its obsessions, its beliefs; with whatever it finds moving, interesting, exciting, or repugnant.”

— Michel Houellebecq

77. “Love binds, and it binds forever. Good binds, while evil unravels. Separation is another word for evil; it is also another word for deceit. All that exists is a magnificent interweaving, vast and reciprocal.”

— Michel Houellebecq

78. “The feeling of closeness when we talked on the phone was too violent, and the void that came afterward too cruel.”

— Michel Houellebecq

79. “The Enlightened One, if he had meditated on it, would not necessarily have rejected a technical solution.”

— Michel Houellebecq

80. “I don’t like this world. I definitely do not like it. The society in which I live disgusts me; advertising sickens me; computers make me puke. My entire work as a computer expert consists of adding to the data, the cross-referencing, the criteria of rational decision-making. It has no meaning. To tell the truth, it is even negative up to a point; a useless encumbering of the neurons. This world has need of many things, bar more information.”

— Michel Houellebecq

81. “It is in our relations with other people that we gain a sense of ourselves; it’s that, pretty much, that makes relations with other people unbearable.”

— Michel Houellebecq

82. “Bloy was the ultimate weapon against the twentieth century, its mediocrity, its moronic ‘engagement,’ its cloying humanitarianism; against Sartre, and Camus, and all their political playacting; and against all those sickening formalists, the nouveau roman, the pointless absurdity of it all.”

— Michel Houellebecq

83. “Nothing – not even death – seems worse than the prospect of living in a broken body.”

— Michel Houellebecq

84. “It was amazing, even, to think that the only thing left to people in their despair was reading.”

— Michel Houellebecq

85. “I think that if I am notorious, it is because other people have decided that this is how I should be.”

— Michel Houellebecq

86. “Everyday morality is always a blend, variously proportioned, of perfect morality and other more ambiguous ideas, for the most part religious. The greater the proportion of pure morality in a particular system, the happier and more enduring the society. Ultimately, a society governed by the pure principles of universal morality could last until the end of the world.”

— Michel Houellebecq

87. “A life lived in pursuit of a goal leaves little time for reminiscence.”

— Michel Houellebecq

88. “You really can’t do anything about people’s lives, I said to myself, neither friendship nor compassion nor the intelligence of the situations is of any use: people manufacture the mechanism of their own misfortune, they wind it right up and the mechanism goes on turning.”

— Michel Houellebecq

89. “To refuse to do something because you’ve already done it, because you’ve already been there, rapidly leads to the destruction, for yourself as much as for others, of any reason for living, for any possible future, and it plunges you into an oppressive ennui that will eventually transform into atrocious bitterness, accompanied by hatred and rancor toward those who still belong to the land of the living.”

— Michel Houellebecq

90. “The mere will to live was clearly no match for the pains and aggravations that punctuate the life of the average Western man.”

— Michel Houellebecq

91. “In the presence of a reader of Teilhard De Chardin I feel disarmed, nonplussed, ready to break down in tears.”

— Michel Houellebecq

92. “The response closest to the truth was probably something like ‘Nothing’; but it’s always difficult to explain that kind of thing to an active person.”

— Michel Houellebecq

93. “The great advantage of a novel is you can put in whatever comes into your head – it has the same shape as the human brain.”

— Michel Houellebecq

94. “I am for the muscles. I would like to have a lot of muscles, because women like it. I’m for bodybuilding, but it’s very exhausting.”

— Michel Houellebecq

95. “The sun shone on the meadows and woods like a trusted employee.”

— Michel Houellebecq

96. “This progressive effacement of human relationships is not without certain problems for the novel. How, in point of fact, would one handle the narration of those unbridled passions, stretching over many years, and at times making their effect felt on several generations? We’re a long way from Wuthering Heights, to say the least. The novel form is not conceived for depicting indifference or nothingness; a flatter, more terse, and dreary discourse would need to be invented.”

— Michel Houellebecq

97. “I maintained a tactical silence. When you maintain a tactical silence and look people right in the eye, as if drinking in their words, they talk. People like to be listened to, as every researcher knows – every researcher, every writer, every spy.”

— Michel Houellebecq

98. “I can’t hide the truth: I will end my life unhappy, cantankerous and alone, and I will have deserved it.”

— Michel Houellebecq

99. “Only literature can grant you access to a spirit from beyond the grave – a more direct, more complete, deeper access than you’d have in conversation with a friend.”

— Michel Houellebecq

100. “You have to take an interest in something in life, I told myself. I wondered what could interest me, now that I was finished with love. I could take a course in wine tasting, maybe, or start collecting model aeroplanes.”

— Michel Houellebecq