Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly Quotes

• “For in Paris, whenever God puts a pretty woman there (the streets), the Devil, in reply, immediately puts a fool to keep her.”

  Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly

  59 Copy to clipboard Copy quote
• “The Devil teaches women what they are – or they would teach it to the Devil if he did not know.”

  Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly

  56 Copy to clipboard Copy quote

Advertisement

Advertisement
• “Night, which in Autumn seems to fall from the sky so suddenly, chilled us...”

  Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly

  46 Copy to clipboard Copy quote
• “In Paris, where raillery is so quick to throw emotion out the window, silence, in a roomful of clever people after a story, is the most flattering of all marks of success”

  Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly

  13 Copy to clipboard Copy quote

Advertisement

Advertisement

• “Extreme civilization robs crime of its frightful poetry, and prevents the writer from restoring it. That would be too dreadful, say those good souls who want everything to be prettified, even the horrible. In the name of philanthropy, imbecile criminologists reduce the punishment, and inept moralists the crime, and what is more they reduce the crime only in order to reduce the punishment. Yet the crimes of extreme civilization are undoubtedly more atrocious than those of extreme barbarism, by virtue of their refinement, of the corruption they imply and of their superior degree of intellectualism. ("A Woman's Vengeance")”

  Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly

  12 Copy to clipboard Copy quote
• “They had...finished their lives before their death – which is not always the end of life and often comes long before the end.”

  Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly

  11 Copy to clipboard Copy quote

Advertisement

Advertisement
• “I did not want to be taken for a fool – the typical French reason for performing the worst of deeds without remorse.”

  Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly

  11 Copy to clipboard Copy quote
• “Hatred needs scorn. Scorn is hatred's nectar!”

  Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly

  9 Copy to clipboard Copy quote

Advertisement

Advertisement
• “Men are all the same. Novelty amongst themselves displeases and upsets them – but if the novelty is wearing a skirt, they go crazy for it.
  
  (Les hommes sont tous les mêmes. L'étrangeté leur déplaît, d'homme à homme, et les blesse ; mais si l'étrangeté porte des jupes, ils en raffolent.)”

  Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly

  8 Copy to clipboard Copy quote
• “For a decadent like Baudelaire the only possible ends are suicide or the foot of the cross”

  Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly

  7 Copy to clipboard Copy quote

Advertisement

Advertisement
• “Yet, whether to the glory or to the shame of human nature, in what we call pleasure (with an excess of scorn, perhaps) there are abysses as deep as those of love.”

  Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly

  6 Copy to clipboard Copy quote
• “She was one of those women of good family who no longer exist, elegant, distinguished, and haughty, whose pallor and thinness seem to say, 'I am conquered by the era, like all my breed. I am dying, but I despise you,' and - devil take me! - plebeian as I am, and though it is not very philosophical , I cannot help finding that beautiful.”

  Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly

  6 Copy to clipboard Copy quote

Advertisement

Advertisement
• “Beauty is single. Only ugliness is multiple, and even then its multiplicity is soon exhausted.”

  Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly

  5 Copy to clipboard Copy quote
• “He was terrified by the sublime horror of it, for intensity of feeling, carried to this degree, is sublime. ("A Woman's Vengeance")”

  Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly

  5 Copy to clipboard Copy quote

Advertisement

Advertisement
• “Fools – in other words most people – imagine that it would be a wonderful achievement to be able to recover our youth; but those who know life are aware how little it would profit us. ("A Woman's Vengeance")”

  Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly

  5 Copy to clipboard Copy quote
• “We priests are the surgeons of souls, and it is our duty to deliver them of shameful secrets they would fain conceal, with hands careful to neither wound no pollute.”

  Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly

  5 Copy to clipboard Copy quote

Advertisement

Advertisement
• “For with dandies, a joke is the only way of making yourself respected.”

  Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly

  5 Copy to clipboard Copy quote
• “Dandies, who – as you know - scorn all emotions as being beneath them, and do not believe, like that simpleton Goethe, that astonishment can ever be a proper feeling for the human mind.”

  Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly

  4 Copy to clipboard Copy quote

Advertisement

Advertisement
• “My good fellow,” said Mesnil, stopping, “ever since the creation of the world there have been men like me specially intended to astonish men...men like you.”

  Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly

  4 Copy to clipboard Copy quote
• “She was as inept at causing pain as she was at giving pleasure. Strange lioness, indeed! She thought she possessed claws, but when she tried to bare them, nothing emerged from her magnificent velvet paws. Her scratches were of velvet!”

  Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly

  3 Copy to clipboard Copy quote

Advertisement

Advertisement
• “And, in fact, if these crimes appeal less to the senses, they appeal more to the mind; and the mind, in the last analysis, is the profoundest part of us. For the novelist, therefore, there is a new type of tragedy to be derived from these crimes, more intellectual than physical in character, which do not really seem to be crimes to the superficial judgement of old materialistic societies because they do not involve bloodshed, and murder is committed only in the sphere of feelings and manners.”

  Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly

  3 Copy to clipboard Copy quote
• “He had a reputation in society as a man with a lively wit, whose gaiety was pleasant and formidable – which all gaiety must be in a society which would despise you if, while amusing it, you did not make it tremble a little. ("A Woman's Vengeance")”

  Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly

  3 Copy to clipboard Copy quote

Advertisement

Advertisement
• “(it was) beautiful, like so many senseless things.”

  Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly

  2 Copy to clipboard Copy quote

• “Now, Mesnilgrand saw himself come to full maturity without the great military career that he had hoped for, his sword rusting in its scabbard, his feelings swelling up into the bitterest kind of rage. [...] An ingenious moralist, preoccupid by how illogical our destinies appear to be, once explained it by hypothesizing that men are like portrairs: the ones who have only their head and shoulders depicted seem larger than they could really have been in life, while others practically disappear, shrunken and reduced to looking like dwarves by the absurd size of their portrait's frame. [...] Back then, people thought he would either kill himself or go mad. He did not kill himself, and his mind stayed whole. He did not go mad. But then, that was because he was mad already, said the jokers—for there are always jokers. But although he did not kill himself—and, given his nature, his comrades chose not to ask him why he did not—he was not the kind of man to let his heart be eaten by a vulture without at least trying to break the vulture's beak.”

  Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly

  2 Copy to clipboard Copy quote

Advertisement

Advertisement

• “If writers only dared to dare, a Suetonius or a Tacitus of the Novel could exist, for the Novel is essentially the history of manners, turned into a story and a play, as is History itself often enough. And there is no other difference than this: that the one, the Novel, cloaks its manners under the disguise of invented characters, while the other, History, provides names and addresses. Only, the Novel probes much deeper than history. It has an ideal, and History has none; it is limited by reality. The Novel also holds the stage much longer. ("A Woman's Vengeance")”

  Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly

  2 Copy to clipboard Copy quote

Advertisement