Top 120 Muriel Barbery Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “People aim for the stars, and they end up like goldfish in a bowl. I wonder if it wouldn’t be simpler just to teach children right from the start that life is absurd.”

— Muriel Barbery

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

— Muriel Barbery

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3. “Todo llega cuando tiene que llegar para quien sabe esperar...”

— Muriel Barbery

4. “Madame Michel has the elegance of the hedgehog: on the outside she is covered in quills, a real fortress, but my gut feeling is that on the inside, she has the same simple refinement as the hedgehog: a deceptively indolent little creature, fiercely solitary – and terrible elegant.”

— Muriel Barbery

5. “I am going to die, but that is of no importance.”

— Muriel Barbery

6. “Personally I think that grammar is a way to attain beauty.”

— Muriel Barbery

7. “When illness enters a home, not only does it take hold of a body. It also weaves a dark web between hearts, a web where hope is trapped.”

— Muriel Barbery

8. “Beautiful things should belong to beautiful souls.”

— Muriel Barbery

9. “Because art is life, playing to other rhythms.”

— Muriel Barbery

10. “That’s what the future is for: to build the present, with real plans, made by living people. – The Elegance of the Hedgehog.”

— Muriel Barbery

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

— Muriel Barbery

12. “What is an aristocrat? A woman who is never sullied by vulgarity, although she may be surrounded by it.”

— Muriel Barbery

13. “Talent consists not in inventing shapes but in causing those that were invisible to emerge.”

— Muriel Barbery

14. “Where is beauty to be found? In great things that, like everything else, are doomed to die, or in small things that inspire nothing, yet know how to set a jewel of infinity in a single moment?”

— Muriel Barbery

15. “Literature, for example, serves a pragmatic purpose. Like any form of Art, literature’s mission is to make the fulfillment of our essential duties more bearable.”

— Muriel Barbery

16. “I’m afraid to go into myself and see what’s going on in there.”

— Muriel Barbery

17. “When tea becomes ritual, it takes its place at the heart of our ability to see greatness in small things. Where is beauty to be found? In great things that, like everything else, are doomed to die, or in small things that aspire to nothing, yet know how to set a jewel of infinity in a single moment?”

— Muriel Barbery

18. “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.”

— Muriel Barbery

19. “Don’t worry Renee, I won’t commit suicide and I won’t burn a thing. Because from now on, for you, I’ll be searching for those moments of always within never. Beauty, in this world.”

— Muriel Barbery

20. “When tea becomes ritual, it takes place at the heart of our ability to see greatness in small things.”

— Muriel Barbery

21. “The real ordeal is not leaving those you love but learning to live without those who don’t love you.”

— Muriel Barbery

22. “Humans live in a world where the weak are dominant. This is a terrible insult to our animal nature, a sort of perversion or a deep contradiction.”

— Muriel Barbery

23. “With the exception of love, friendship and the beauty of art, I don’t see much else that can nurture human life.”

— Muriel Barbery

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

— Muriel Barbery

25. “When something is bothering me, I seek refuge. No need to travel far; a trip to the realm of literary memory will suffice. For where can one find more noble distraction, more entertaining company, more delightful enchantment than in literature?”

— Muriel Barbery

26. “We never look beyond our assumptions and what’s worse, we have given up trying to meet others; we just meet ourselves.”

— Muriel Barbery

27. “If there is one thing I despise, it is the perverse affectation of rich people who go around dressing as if they were poor, in second-hand clothes, ill-fitting gray wool bonnets, socks full of holes, and flowered shirts under threadbare sweaters. Not only is it ugly, it is also insulting: nothing is more despicable than a rich man’s scorn for a poor man’s longing.”

— Muriel Barbery

28. “I may be indigent in name, position, and in appearance, but in my own mind I am an unrivaled goddess -.”

— Muriel Barbery

29. “In our world, that’s the way you live your grown-up life: you must constantly rebuild your identity as an adult, the way it’s been put together it is wobbly, ephemeral, and fragile, it cloaks despair and, when you’re alone in front of the mirror, it tells you the lies you need to believe.”

— Muriel Barbery

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

— Muriel Barbery

31. “I may know that the world is an ugly place, I still don’t want to see it.”

— Muriel Barbery

32. “We don’t recognize each other because other people have become our permanent mirrors. If we actually realized this, if we were able to become aware of the fact that we are only ever looking at ourselves in the other person, that we are alone in the wilderness, we would go crazy.”

— Muriel Barbery

33. “I find this a fascinating phenomenon: the ability we have to manipulate ourselves so that the foundation of our beliefs is never shaken.”

— Muriel Barbery

34. “There are only two moments when everything is possible in this life,” said Petrus, “when one drinks, and when one makes up stories.”

— Muriel Barbery

35. “What makes the strength of a soldier isn’t the energy he uses trying to intimidate the other guy by sending him a whole lot of signals, it’s the strength he’s able to concentrate within himself, by staying centered.”

— Muriel Barbery

36. “Civilization is the mastery of violence, the triumph, constantly challenged, over the aggressive nature of the primate. For primates we have been and primates we shall remain, however often we learn to find joy in a camellia on moss. This is the very purpose of education.”

— Muriel Barbery

37. “Yes, the world may aspire to vacuousness, lost souls mourn beauty, insignificance surrounds us. Then let us drink a cup of tea. Silence descends, one hears the wind outside, autumn leaves rustle and take flight, the cat sleeps in a warm pool of light. And, with each swallow, time is sublimed.”

— Muriel Barbery

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

— Muriel Barbery

39. “Do you know that it is in your company that I have had my finest thoughts?”

— Muriel Barbery

40. “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.”

— Muriel Barbery

41. “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.”

— Muriel Barbery

42. “In the end, I wonder if the true movement of the world might not be a voice raised in song.”

— Muriel Barbery

43. “Just by observing the adults around me I understood very early on that life goes by in no time at all, yet they’re always in such a hurry, so stressed out by deadlines, so eager for now that they needn’t think about tomorrow... But if you dread tomorrow, it’s because you don’t know how to build the present, and when you don’t know how to build the present, you tell yourself you can deal with it tomorrow, and it’s a lost cause anyway because tomorrow always ends up becoming today, don’t you see?”

— Muriel Barbery

44. “If you have but one friend, make sure you choose her well.”

— Muriel Barbery

45. “Melancholy overwhelms me at supersonic speed.”

— Muriel Barbery

46. “What does art do for us? It gives shape to our emotions.”

— Muriel Barbery

47. “Just as teardrops, when they are large and round and compassionate, can leave a long strand washed clean of discord, the summer rain as it washes away the motionless dust can bring to a person’s soul something like endless breathing.”

— Muriel Barbery

48. “Because beauty consits of it’s own passing, just as we reach for it. It’s the ephemeral configuration of things in the moment, when you can see both their movement and their death.”

— Muriel Barbery

49. “Don’t let the cat out or the concierge in: this is the first principle of socialist ladies.”

— Muriel Barbery

50. “Maybe that’s what being alive is about: so we can track down those movments that are dying.”

— Muriel Barbery