"We have the divinity of our great misery. And our solitude, with its toilsome ideas, tears and laughter, is fatally divine. However wrong we may go … - Henri Barbusse

"We have the divinity of our great misery. And our solitude, with its toilsome ideas, tears and laughter, is fatally divine. However wrong we may go in the dark and the useless work of our hearts working incessantly, and whatever our ignorance left to itself, and whatever the wounds that other human beings are, we ought to study ourselves with a sort of devotion. It is this sentiment that lights our foreheads, uplifts our souls, adorns our pride, and, in spite of everything, will console us when we shall become accustomed to holding, each at his own poor task, the whole place that God used to occupy. The truth itself gives an effective, practical, and, so to speak, religious caress to the suppliant in whom the heavens spread.

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"I have such respect for the actual truth that there are moments when I do not dare to call things by their name," the poet ended."

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About Henri Barbusse

Henri Barbusse (17 May 1873 – 30 August 1935) was a French novelist, journalist and member of the French Communist Party.

Biography information from Wikiquote

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Additional quotes by Henri Barbusse

The revelation still seems to me so terrible that the silence of men, heaped under the roofs down there at my feet, seizes and threatens me. And if I am but timidly formulating it within myself, that is because each of us has lived in reality more than his life, and because my training has filled me, like the rest, with centuries of shadow, of humiliation and captivity. It is establishing itself cautiously; but it is the truth, and there are moments when logic seizes you in its godlike whirlwind.

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