About Muriel Barbery: Muriel Barbery is a French novelist and professor of philosophy.
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 ...
For the first time in my life I understood the meaning of the word 'never'. And it's really awful. You say the word a hundred times a day but you don't really know what you're saying until you're faced with a real 'never again'.
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.
Melancholy overwhelms me at supersonic speed.
Because from now on, for you, I'll be searching for those moments of always within never/ Beauty, in this world.
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.
Here are all these people, full of heartache or hatred or desire, and we all have our troubles and the school year is filled with vulgarity and triviality and consequence, and there are all these teachers and kids of every shape and size, and there's...
Music plays a huge role in my life. It is music that helps me to endure ... well ... everything there is to endure.
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.
I wondered if I'd ever get over the pain of it. It hurt so much I wanted to scream. But I didn't scream. What I feel now is that the pain is still there but it isn't keeping me from walking or talking, it's a feeling of complete helplessness and absu...
Nadie parece haber caído en cuenta de que si la existencia es absurda, lograr en ella un éxito brillante no tiene más valor que fracasar por completo.
Any game where the goal is to build territory has to be beautiful. There may be phases of combat, but they are only means to an end, to allow your territory to survive. One of the most extraordinary aspects of the game of go is that it has been prove...
When we move, we are in a way de-structured by our movement something: we are both here and at the same time not here because we're already in the process of going elsewhere, if you see what I mean. To stop de-structuring yourself, you have to stop m...
To be poor, ugly and, moreover, intelligent condemns one in our society to a dark and disillusioned life...to beauty all is forgiven.
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.
They didn't recognize me," I say. I come to a halt in the middle of the sidewalk, completely flabbergasted. "They didn't recognize me," I repeat. He stops in turn, my hand still on his arm. "It is because they have never seen you," he says. "I would ...
I'm afraid to go into myself and see what's going on in there.
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 so...
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 tre...
I understood that I was suffering because I couldn't make anyone else around me feel better.
Entrusting one's life is not the same as opening up one's soul.
