280 Quotes by Michel Houellebecq

For these Muslims, the real enemy – the thing they fear and hate – isn’t Catholicism. It’s secularism. It’s laicism. It’s atheist materialism. They think of Catholics as fellow believers. Catholicism is a religion of the Book. Catholics are one step away from converting to Islam – that’s the true, original Muslim vision of Christianity.

In that time he had managed to write books that made me consider him a friend more than a hundred years later.

The feeling of closeness when we talked on the phone was too violent, and the void that came afterward too cruel.

On Sunday morning I went out for a while in the neighbourhood; I bought some raisin bread. The day was warm but a little sad, as Sundays often are in Paris, especially when one doesn’t believe in God.

To the end, I will remain a child of Europe, of worry and of shame; I have no message of hope to deliver. For the West, I do not feel hatred; at most I feel a great contempt. I know only that every single one of us reeks of selfishness, masochism and death. We have created a system in which it has simply become impossible to live; and what’s more, we continue to export it.

Active people don’t change the world profoundly; ideas do. Napoleon is less important in world history than Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

But it remains the case that, on the level of consumption, the preeminence of the twentieth century was indisputable: nothing.

The human race will disappear. Other races in turn will appear and disappear. The skies will be glacial and empty, traversed by the feeble light of half-dead stars. These too will disappear. Everything will disappear. And human actions are as free and as stripped of meaning as the unfettered movements of the elementary particles. Good, evil, morality, sentiments? Pure ‘Victorian fictions.’ All that exists is egotism. Cold, intact, and radiant.

If they can read in the eyes of a man an energy, a passion, then they find him attractive.