Top 120 Michel Houellebecq Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “When men have no vices, she thought, it’s very difficult to guess what might make them happy.”

— Michel Houellebecq

102. “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

103. “The greater the proportion of pure morality in a particular system, the happier and more enduring the society.”

— Michel Houellebecq

104. “Why am I popular? I don’t know. Is it a mistake? I should think it’s a mistake somewhere.”

— Michel Houellebecq

105. “Life begins at fifty, that’s true, inasmuch as it ends at forty.”

— Michel Houellebecq

106. “Should I just die? The decision struck me as premature.”

— Michel Houellebecq

107. “He trusted that I would have a very pleasant stay: it was so peaceful, and the meals were delicious. As he said it, I realized that he was expressing not just a belief, but a hope, because he was one of those people, and you don’t see them every day, who take an instinctive pleasure in the happiness of their fellow men – that he was, in other words, a nice guy.”

— Michel Houellebecq

108. “His masterpiece was a dead end – but isn’t that true of any masterpiece?”

— Michel Houellebecq

109. “Those who think they know me are simply lacking in information.”

— Michel Houellebecq

110. “While I was waiting to die, I still had the Journal of Nineteenth-Century Studies.”

— Michel Houellebecq

111. “What was he doing? Reading a little, maybe. We can’t even be sure of this. In fact, his biographers have to admit they don’t know much at all, and that, judging from appearances – at least between the ages of eighteen and twenty-three – he did absolutely nothing.”

— Michel Houellebecq

112. “The fighting had begun. You could make out groups of masked men roaming around with assault rifles and automatic weapons. Windows had been broken, here and there cars were on fire, but the images, shot in the pelting rain, were of such poor quality it was impossible to get a clear idea of who was doing what.”

— Michel Houellebecq

113. “Polemical debates happen all the time in France.”

— Michel Houellebecq

114. “In my own writing, I think of myself as a realist who exaggerates a little.”

— Michel Houellebecq

115. “People like to be listened to, as every researcher knows – every researcher, every writer, every spy.”

— Michel Houellebecq

116. “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

117. “They were really willing to pay to avoid any trouble. No doubt they had overestimated the ability of academics to make a nuisance of themselves. It had been years since an academic title gained you access to major media... Even if all the university professors in France had risen up in protest, almost nobody would have noticed, but apparently they hadn’t found that out in Saudi Arabia. They still believed, deep down, in the power of the intellectual elite. It was almost touching.”

— Michel Houellebecq

118. “Animals live without feeling the least need of justification, as do the crushing majority of men. They live because they live, and then I suppose they die because they die, and for them that’s all there is to it.”

— Michel Houellebecq

119. “This evening, sprawled on the sofa, this animal with whom he shared one half of his genetic code had overstepped the unspoken boundaries of decent human conversation.”

— Michel Houellebecq

120. “In that time he had managed to write books that made me consider him a friend more than a hundred years later.”

— Michel Houellebecq

121. “I’ve lived so little that I tend to imagine I’m not going to die; it seems improbable that human existence can be reduced to so little; one imagines, in spite of oneself, that sooner or later something is bound to happen. A big mistake. A life can just as well be both empty and short. The days slip by indifferently, leaving neither trace nor memory; and then all of a sudden they stop. At times, too, I’ve had the impression that I’d manage to feel quite at home in a life of vacuity. That.”

— Michel Houellebecq

122. “What could we do, then? We asked ourselves the question while crossing the dunes. Live? It’s precisely in this kind of situation that, crushed by the sense of their own insignificance, people decide to have children; this is how the species reproduces, although less and less, it must be said.”

— Michel Houellebecq

123. “Like all countries in Western Europe, Spain, engaged in a deadly process of increasing productivity, had gradually rid itself of all low-skilled jobs that had previously helped to keep life a little less unpleasant, and in doing so had condemned the majority of its population to mass unemployment.”

— Michel Houellebecq

124. “In all of human history there may never have been a mind as brilliant as Isaac Newton’s – just think what an amazing, unheard-of intellectual effort it took to discover a single law that accounted for the fall of earthly bodies and the movement of the planets! Well, Newton believed in God.”

— Michel Houellebecq

125. “What’s amazing about Bayrou, what makes him irreplaceable,” Tanneur enthused, “is that he’s an utter moron.”

— Michel Houellebecq

126. “The map is more interesting than the territory.”

— Michel Houellebecq

127. “In this apartment, as in his whole life now, he knew he would always feel as though he were staying in a hotel.”

— Michel Houellebecq

128. “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

129. “If there is one thing that has always plunged me into sadness or compassion, I mean into a state that excludes all manner of nastiness or irony, it is the existence of Teilhard de Chardin – not only his existence, but the fact that he has, or could have had, readers, however small the number. In the presence of a reader of Teilhard de Chardin I feel disarmed, nonplussed, ready to break down in tears.”

— Michel Houellebecq

130. “Much, maybe too much, has been written about literature.”

— Michel Houellebecq

131. “In Cohen’s opinion, the ideas manifest in Nietzsche’s philosophy – the rejection of compassion, the elevation of individuals above the moral order and the triumph of the will – led directly to Nazism.”

— Michel Houellebecq

132. “Yet the special thing about literature, the major art form of a Western civilization now ending before our very eyes, is not hard to define.”

— Michel Houellebecq

133. “An atmosphere of general catastrophe always alleviates individual catastrophe- that’s probably why suicides are so rare in wartime.”

— Michel Houellebecq