Top 120 Muriel Barbery Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “Gli adolescenti credono di diventare adulti scimmiottando adulti rimasti bambini che fuggono davanti alla vita.”

— Muriel Barbery

52. “We think we can make honey without sharing in the fate of bees, but we are in truth nothing but poor bees, destined to accomplish our task and then die.”

— Muriel Barbery

53. “Tutti pensano che i bambini non sanno niente. Viene da chiedersi se i grandi sono stati mai bambini.”

— Muriel Barbery

54. “As a child I often wondered whether I would be allowed to live such moments- to inhabit the slow, majestic ballet of the snowflakes, to be released at last from the dreary frenzy of time. Is that what it feels to be naked? All one’s clothes are gone, yet one’s mind is overladen with finery.”

— Muriel Barbery

55. “This is eminently true of many happy moments in life. Freed from the demands of decision and intention, adrift on some inner sea, we observe our various movements as if they belonged to someone else, and yet we admire their involuntary excellence.”

— Muriel Barbery

56. “The only purpose of cats is that they constitute mobile decorative objects.”

— Muriel Barbery

57. “Personally I think there is only one thing to do: find the task we have been placed on this earth to do, and accomplish it as best we can, with all our strength, without making things complicated or thinking there’s anything divine about our nature.”

— Muriel Barbery

58. “Personally I think there is only one thing to do: find the task we have been placed on this earth to do, and accomplish it as best we can, with all our strength, without making things complicated or thinking there’s anything divine about our animal nature. This is the only way we will ever feel that we have been doing something constructive when death comes to get us.”

— Muriel Barbery

59. “Live or die: mere consequences of what you have built. What matters is building well.”

— Muriel Barbery

60. “I had a brief glimpse of a frail, mature man carrying a ravaged child in his arms...”

— Muriel Barbery

61. “What does Art do for us? It gives shape to our emotions, makes them visible, and, in so doing, places a seal of eternity upon them, a seal representing all those works that, by means of a particular form, have incarnated the universal nature of human emotions.”

— Muriel Barbery

62. “That is the way a summer rain can take hold in you- like a new heart, beating in time with another’s.”

— Muriel Barbery

63. “Conclusion: better to be a thinking monk than a postmodern thinker.”

— Muriel Barbery

64. “I belong to the 8% of the world population who calm their apprehension by drowning it in numbers.”

— Muriel Barbery

65. “So if there is something on the planet that is worth living for, I’d better not miss it, because once you’re dead, it’s too late for regrets, and if you die by mistake, that is really, really dumb.”

— Muriel Barbery

66. “It is always reassuring to be disabused of one’s own paranoia.”

— Muriel Barbery

67. “We can be friends. We can be anything we want to be.”

— Muriel Barbery

68. “If you can pretend to ignore the fact that you’ve got a right hand, what else can you pretend to ignore? Can you have a negative heart, a hollow soul?”

— Muriel Barbery

69. “Elsewhere the world may be blustering or sleeping, wars are fought, people live and die, some nations disintegrate, while others are born, soon to be swallowed up in turn – and in all this sound and fury, amidst eruptions and undertows, while the world goes its merry way, bursts into flames, tears itself apart and is reborn: human life continues to throb.”

— Muriel Barbery

70. “I barboni non sono mica tutti socialisti, e la poverta’ non rende per niente rivoluzionari.”

— Muriel Barbery

71. “Fatevi una sola amica, ma sceglietela con cura.”

— Muriel Barbery

72. “We musn’t forget old people with their rotten bodies, old people who are so close to death, something that young people don’t want to think about. We musn’t forget that our bodies decline, friends die, everyone forgets about us, and the end is solitude. Nor must we forget that these old people were young once, that a lifespan is pathetically short, that one day you’re twenty and the next day you’re eighty.”

— Muriel Barbery

73. “Do you know what an involuntary act signifies? Psychoanalysts say that it reflects the insidious maneuvering of one’s hidden unconscious. What a pointless theory, in fact. When we do something involuntarily, this is the most visible sign of the power of our conscious will; for our will, when opposed by emotion, makes use all of its wiles to attain its ends.”

— Muriel Barbery

74. “But enough of phenomenology; it is nothing more than the solitary, endless monologue of consciousness, a hard-core autism that no real cat would ever importune.”

— Muriel Barbery

75. “I know that they’re all unhappy because nobody loves the right person the way they should and because they don’t understand that it’s really their own self that they’re mad at.”

— Muriel Barbery

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

— Muriel Barbery

77. “It would never have crossed her mind spontaneously that somebody might actually need silence. That silence helps you to go inward, that anyone who is interested in something more than just life outside actually needs silence: this, I think, is not something Colombe is capable of understanding, because her inner space is as chaotic and noisy as the street outside.”

— Muriel Barbery

78. “Poverty is a reaper: it harvests everything inside us that might have made us capable of social intercourse with others, and leaves us empty, purged of feeling, so that we may endure all the darkness of the present day.”

— Muriel Barbery

79. “French with Madame Fine is reduce to a long series of technical exercises whether we’re doing grammar or reading texts. With her it’s as if a text was written so that we can identify the characters, the narrator, the setting, the plot, the time of the story, and so on. I don’t think it has ever occurred to her that a text is written above all to be read and to arouse emotions in the reader. Can you imagine, she has never even asked us the question: “Did you like this book?”

— Muriel Barbery

80. “One must concede to others what one tolerates in oneself.”

— Muriel Barbery

81. “Entrusting one’s life is not the same as opening up one’s soul.”

— Muriel Barbery

82. “For where can one find more noble distraction, more entertaining company, more delightful enchantment than in literature?”

— Muriel Barbery

83. “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.”

— Muriel Barbery

84. “We never look beyond our assumptions and, what’s worse, we have given up trying to meet others; we just meet ourselves. We don’t recognize each other because other people have become our permanent mirrors.”

— Muriel Barbery

85. “True faith, it is a well-known fact, has little regard for chapels, but does believe in the communion of mysteries.”

— Muriel Barbery

86. “But the fact that the middle classes are working themselves to the bone, using their sweat and taxes to finance such pointless and pretentious research leaves me speechless. Every gray morning, day after gloomy day, secretaries, craftsmen, employees, petty civil servants, taxi drivers and concierges shoulder their burdens so that the flower of French youth, duly housed and subsidized, can squander the fruit of all that dreariness upon the altar of ridiculous endeavors.”

— Muriel Barbery

87. “What makes the strength of the 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. That Maori player was like a tree, a great indestructible oak with deep roots and a powerful radiance- everyone could feel it. And yet you also got the impression that the great oak could fly, that it would be as quick as the wind, despite, or perhaps because of, its deep roots.”

— Muriel Barbery

88. “But the world, in its present state, is no place for princesses.”

— Muriel Barbery

89. “And I wonder how well I myself can see.”

— Muriel Barbery

90. “What is particularly amusing about cocker spaniels is their swaying gait when they are in a playful mood: it’s as if they had tiny little springs screwed to their paws that cause them to bounce upward – but gently, without jolting. This also affects their paws and ears like the rolling of a ship, so cocker spaniels, like jaunty little vessels plying dry land, lend a nautical touch to the urban landscape: utterly enchanting.”

— Muriel Barbery

91. “This is the end of an epic tale, the story of my coming of age, which, like in the novels of the same description, went from wonder to ambition, from ambition to disillusion, and from disillusion to cynicism.”

— Muriel Barbery

92. “After a day spent running around outside, Clara never went home without first slipping through the orchard, where she would stop to pray to the spirits of enclosure to prepare her for her return within four walls.”

— Muriel Barbery

93. “So much for the movement of the world! It could have been perfection and it was a disaster. It should be experienced in reality and it is pleasure by proxy, like always.”

— Muriel Barbery

94. “So: have our civilizations become so destitute that we can only live in our fear of want? Can we only enjoy our possessions or our senses when we are certain that we shall always be able to enjoy them? Perhaps the Japanese have learned that you can only savor a pleasure when you know it is ephemeral and unique; armed with this knowledge, they are yet able to weave their lives.”

— Muriel Barbery

95. “God appeases our animal fears and the unbearable prospect that someday all our pleasures will cease.”

— Muriel Barbery

96. “As always, I am saved by the inability of living creatures to believe anything that might cause the walls of their little mental assumptions to crumble.”

— Muriel Barbery

97. “Degustare e’ un atto di piacere, raccontare questo piacere e’ un fatto artistico, ma l’unica vera opera d’arte, in definitiva, e’ il banchetto di un’altro.”

— Muriel Barbery

98. “I also wonder fearfully what will happen when the only friend I have ever had, the only one who knows everything without ever having to ask, leaves behind her this woman whom no one knows, enshrouding her in oblivion.”

— Muriel Barbery

99. “It would be so much better if we could share our insecurity, if we could all venture inside ourselves and realize that green beans and vitamin C, however much they nurture us, cannot save lives, or sustain our souls.”

— Muriel Barbery

100. “It’s a really weird way of looking at life to want to become an adult by imitating everything that is most catastrophic about adulthood.”

— Muriel Barbery