Top 91 Quotes & Sayings by Louis-Ferdinand Celine
Explore popular quotes and sayings by a French novelist Louis-Ferdinand Celine.
Last updated on September 17, 2024.
One can't relive one's life. Forgiveness is not what's difficult; one's always too ready to forgive. And it does no good, that's obvious.
Truth is a pain which will not stop. And the truth of this world is to die. You must choose: either dying or lying. Personally, I have never been able to kill myself.
To philosophize is only another way of being afraid and leads hardly anywhere but to cowardly make-believe.
We've no use for intellectuals in this outfit. What we need is chimpanzees. Let me give you a word of advice: never say a word to us about being intelligent. We will think for you, my friend. Don't forget it.
If you aren't rich you should always look useful.
Almost every desire a poor man has is a punishable offence.
Experience is a dim lamp, which only lights the one who bears it.
To hell with reality! I want to die in music, not in reason or in prose. People don't deserve the restraint we show by not going into delirium in front of them. To hell with them!
The poetry of heroism appeals irresistibly to those who don't go to a war, and even more to those whom the war is making enormously wealthy. It's always so.
With two thousand years of Christianity behind him... a man can't see a regiment of soldiers march past without going off the deep end. It starts off far too many ideas in his head.
Life is filigree work. What is written clearly is not worth much, it's the transparency that counts.
Philosophizing is simply one way of being afraid, a cowardly pretense that doesn't get you anywhere.
All that makes a lunatic are the very ordinary ideas of mankind shut up inside a man's head.
Troubles are as endless as pleasures are brief.
whenever they get a chance, never fear, people make you waste hours and months ... they use you as a wall to bounce their bullshit off of ... blah! and blah! and blahblahblah! ... you put up with it for an hour, you'll need two weeks to recover ... blah! blah!
All great innovations are built on rejections.
Never believe straight off in a man's unhappiness. Ask him if he can still sleep. If the answer's "yes," all's well. That is enough.
There's no tyrant like a brain.
The biggest defeat in every department of life is to forget, especially the things that have done you in, and to die without realizing how far people can go in the way of crumminess. When the grave lies open before us, let's not try to be witty, but record the worst of human viciousness we've seen without changing one word. When that's done, we can curl up our toes and sink into the pit. That's work enough for a lifetime.
My trouble is insomnia. If I had always slept properly, I'd never have written a line.
Reason died in 1914, November 1914 ... after that everybody began to rave.
In the whole of your absurd past you discover so much that's absurd, so much deceit and credulity, that it might be a good idea to stop being young this minute, to wait for youth to break away from you and pass you by, to watch it going away, receding in the distance, to see all its vanity, run your hand through the empty space it has left behind, take a last look at it, and then start moving, make sure your youth has really gone, and then calmly, all by yourself, cross to the other side of Time to see what people and things really look like.
The beginning of genius is being scared shitless.
People don't deserve the restraint we show by not going into delirium in front of them.
The whole business of your life overwhelms you when you live alone. One's stupefied by it. To get rid of it you try to daub some of it off on to people who come to see you, and they hate that. To be alone trains one for death.
Living, just by itself - what a dirge that is! Life is a classroom and Boredom's the usher, there all the time to spy on you; whatever happens, you've got to look as if you were awfully busy all the time doing something that's terribly exciting - or he'll come along and nibble your brain.
Even diseases have lost their prestige, there aren't so many of them left. Think it over... no more syphilis, no more clap, no more typhoid... antibiotics have taken half the tragedy out of medicine.
In the kitchens of love, after all, vice is like the pepper in a good sauce; it brings out the flavor, it’s indispensable.
A man should be resigned to knowing himself a little better each day if he hasn't got the guts to put an end to his sniveling once and for all.
Poor people never, or hardly ever, ask for an explanation of all they have to put up with. They hate one another, and content themselves with that.
An unfamiliar city is a fine thing. That's the time and place when you can suppose that all the people you meet are nice. It's dream time.
An Immense hatred keeps me alive... i would live for a thousand years if i were certain of seeing the whole world croak.
You can lose your way groping among the shadows of the past. It's frightening how many people and things there are in a man's past that have stopped moving. The living people we've lost in the crypts of time sleep so soundly side by side with the dead that the same darkness envelops them all. As we grow older, we no longer know whom to awaken, the living or the dead.
The rich don't have to kill to eat. They employ people, as they call it. The rich don't do evil themselves. They pay. People do all they can to please them, and everybody's happy.
Maybe I'd never see him again... maybe he'd gone for good... swallowed up, body and soul, in the kind of stories you hear about... Ah, it's an awful thing... and being young doesn't help any... when you notice for the first time... the way you lose people as you go along ... the buddies you'll never see again... never again... when you notice that they've disappeared like dreams... that it's all over... finished... that you too will get lost someday... a long way off but inevitably... in the awful torrent of things and people... of the days and shapes... that pass... that never stop.
The more one is hated, I find, the happier one is.
Not much music left inside us for life to dance to. Our youth has gone to the ends of the earth to die in the silence of the truth. And where, I ask you, can a man escape to, when he hasn't enough madness left inside him? The truth is an endless death agony. The truth is death. You have to choose: death or lies. I've never been able to kill myself.
When men can hate without risk, their stupidity is easily convinced, the motives supply themselves.
When you stay too long in the same place, things and people go to pot on you, they rot and start stinking for your special benefit.
I crawled back into myself all alone, just delighted to observe that I was even more miserable than before, because I had brought a new kind of distress and something that resembled true feeling into my solitude.
Women always have some mental reservation.
Life must go on, even if it's no joke...just pretend to believe in the future.
There are certain advantages in being cursed by all and sundry ... especially, it dispenses you with having to be nice to anybody ... there's nothing more emollient, stultifying, emasculating than wanting to be liked ... "not nice!" ... that does it, you're free!.
Truth is a pain which will not stop. And the truth of this world is to die. You must choose: either dying or lying. Personally, I have never been able to kill myself
When you're not used to comfort and good things to eat, you're intoxicated by them in no time. Truth's only too pleased to leave you. Very little is ever needed for Truth to let go of you. And after all, you're not really very keen to keep hold of it.
I hadn't found out yet that mankind consists of two very different races, the rich and the poor. It took me ... and plenty of other people . . . twenty years and the war to learn to stick to my class and ask the price of things before touching them, let alone setting my heart on them.
I have never voted in my life... I have always known and understood that the idiots are in a majority so it's certain they will win.
Our journey is entirely imaginary. That is its strength.
I piss on you all from a considerable height.
People avenge themselves for the favors done them.
I'd seen too many troubling things to be easy in my mind. I knew too much and not enough. I'd better go out, I said to myself, I'd better go out again.
Most people die at the last minute; others twenty years beforehand, some even earlier. They are the wretched of the earth.
The plain truth, I may as well admit it, is that I've never been really right in the head.
You can lose your way groping among the shadows of the past.
That is perhaps what we seek throughout life, that and nothing more, the greatest possible sorrow so as to become fully ourselves before dying.
If it is your duty to croak like the toad, then
go ahead! And with all your might! Make them
hear you!
So many vaginas, stomachs, cocks, snouts, and flies you don't know what to do with them ... shovelsfull! ... but hearts? ... very rare! in the last five hundred million years too many cocks and gastric tubes to count ... but hearts? ... on your fingers!.
To hell with reality! I want to die in music, not in reason or in prose.
A God who counts minutes and pennies, a desperate sensual God, who grunts like a pig. A pig with golden wings, who falls and falls, always belly side up, ready for caresses, that’s him, our master. Come, kiss me.
The sadness of the world has different ways of getting to people, but it seems to succeed almost every time.
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