27 Quotes by Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly

"It had to have been the first time something hideous has ever taken place! A father and a mother hurling the heart of their dead child into each other's faces!"

"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."

"Beauty is single. Only ugliness is multiple, and even then its multiplicity is soon exhausted."

"(it was) beautiful, like so many senseless things."

"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."

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

"He was terrified by the sublime horror of it, for intensity of feeling, carried to this degree, is sublime. ("A Woman's Vengeance")"

"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."

"They were like the Neapolitan girl who said that her sorbet was good but that it would have been better if it had been a sin to eat it."

"Night, which in Autumn seems to fall from the sky so suddenly, chilled us..."