Jules Renard Quotes - Page 3

There is nothing like literature: I lose a cow, I write about her death, and my writing pays me enough to buy another cow.

There is a justice, but we do not always see it. Discreet, smiling, it is there, at one side, a little behind injustice, which makes a big noise.

Be modest! It is the kind of pride least likely to offend.

Acting of some actors seems natural, because they have no talent.

Posterity! Why should people be less stupid tomorrow than they are today?

Life is what our character makes it. We fashion it, as a snail does its shell. A man can say: I never made a fortune because it is not in my character to be rich.

Talent is a question of quantity. Talent does not write one page; it writes three hundred.

How many people have wanted to kill themselves, and have been content with tearing up their photograph!

An egotist always resents meeting another egotist as if he alone had the right to be one.

We spend our lives talking about this mystery. Our life.

Dreaming is to think by moonlight by the light of an inner moon.

An optimist is a driver who thinks that empty space at the curb won't have a hydrant beside it.

To have a horror of the bourgeois is bourgeois.

To succeed you must add water to your wine, until there is no more wine.

Our dream dashes itself against the great mystery like a wasp against a window pane. Less merciful than man, God never opens the window.

The bourgeois are other people.

There are places and moments in which one is so completely alone that one sees the world entire.

We are so happy to advise others that occasionally we even do it in their interest.

I have no religion,’ says Borneau, ‘but I respect the religion of others. Religion is sacred.’ Why this privilege, this immunity?... A believer creates God in his own image; if he is ugly, his God will be morally ugly. Why should moral ugliness be respectable?

Writing is a way of talking without being interrupted.

How describe the delicate thing that happens when a brilliant insect alights on a flower? Words, with their weight, fall upon the picture like birds of prey.

In literature, there are only oxen. The biggest ones are the geniuses-the ones who toil eighteen hours a day without tiring.

Whenever I have talked to anyone at too great length, I am like a man who has drunk too much, and ashamed, doesn't know where to put himself.

The less I understand life, the more I live it!

The truly free man is he who can decline a dinner invitation without giving an excuse.