Bussy-rabutin Quotes & Sayings

We must like what we have when we don't have what we like. — Roger De Rabutin, Comte De Bussy

Absence is to love what wind is to fire; it extinguishes the small, it inflames the great. — Roger De Rabutin De Bussy

Love comes from blindness, friendship from knowledge. — Roger De Rabutin, Comte De Bussy

Was this stab in my heart, this rapture, really mine or had I merely read about it? For every feeling, every vicissitude of my passion, there would spring into my mind a quotation from the poets. Shakespeare or Donne or Heine had the exact phrase for it. Comforting, perhaps, but enraging too. Nothing ever seemed spontaneously my own. — Dorothy Bussy

I have occupied this idle, empty winter with writing a story. It has been written to please myself, without thought of my own vanity or modesty, without regard for other people's feelings, without considering whether I shock or hurt the living, without scrupling to speak of the dead.

The world, I know, is changing. I am not indifferent to the revolution that has caught us in its mighty skirts, to the enormity of the flood that is threatening to submerge us. But what could I do? In the welter of the surrounding storm, I have taken refuge for a moment on this little raft, constructed with the salvage of my memory. I have tried to steer it into that calm haven of art in which I still believe. I have tried to avoid some of the rocks and sandbanks that guard its entrance.

[from the introduction] — Dorothy Bussy

If you break this door you will find me dead on the threshold."
And be easy, madame, you shall be revenged," said Bussy. — Alexandre Dumas

How hard it is to kill hope! Time after time, one thinks one has trodden it down, stamped it to death. Time after time, like a noxious insect, it begins to stir again, it shivers back again into a faint tremulous life. Once more it worms its way into one's heart, to instil its poison, to gnaw away the solid hard foundations of life and leave in their place the hollow phantom of illusion. — Dorothy Bussy

How can one bathe without undressing, or write without laying bare one's soul? — Dorothy Bussy

As you know, God is generally on the side of the big squadrons against the small ones. — Roger De Rabutin, Comte De Bussy

God is usually on the side of big squadrons and against little ones. — Roger De Rabutin, Comte De Bussy