Quotes by Maurice Barrès

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Never speak to me again of gloomy Dante! One such artist sang his life with the description of his anxieties. I hope I do not seem to blaspheme the wretched genius if I say that Milton deprived of light, Beethoven excluded from the kingdom of sounds, Pascal paralyzed by disease, Dante banished from the city, were, of all their brethren of misfortune, the best consoled: for it is a imaginary world that the blind saw, that the deaf heard, in which the slave moved and that the exile lived as a divine Florence. I know their groans (they beautify the world) but it is nevertheless a consolation to be made of their own troubles, the remedy of human pain, and one of the solutions to the problem of evil in the universe.