Louis-Ferdinand Celine Quotes - Page 3

Reason died in 1914, November 1914 ... after that everybody began to rave.

Most people die at the last minute; others twenty years beforehand, some even earlier. They are the wretched of the earth.

Experience is a dim lamp, which only lights the one who bears it.

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

It is of men, and of them only, that one should always be frightened.

The sadness of the world has different ways of getting to people, but it seems to succeed almost every time.

Love is the infinite placed within the reach of poodles. I have my dignity!

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.

Lots of men are like that, their artistic leanings never go beyond a weakness for shapely thighs.

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.

I warn you that when the princes of this world start loving you it means they are going to grind you up into battle sausage.

Love is like liquor, the drunker and more impotent you are, the stronger and smarter you think yourself and the surer you are of your rights.

Man hardly comes in more than two varieties, wherever he is, whatever he does: workers and pimps ... they're either one or the other! ... and inventors, the worst kind of jobholder! ... they stand condemned! ... the writer who doesn't pimp along, peacefully plagiarizing, who doesn't pump out the pop stuff, he's had it! ... everybody hates him!

In the kitchens of love, after all, vice is like the pepper in a good sauce; it brings out the flavor, it’s indispensable.

To travel is very useful, it makes the imagination work, the rest is just delusion and pain. Our journey is entirely imaginary, which is its strength.

My trouble is insomnia. If I had always slept properly, I'd never have written a line.

There's a point of poverty at which the spirit isn't with the body all the time. It finds the body really too unbearable. So it's almost as if you were talking to the soul itself. And a soul's not properly responsible.

When it becomes really impossible to get away and sleep, then the will to live evaporates of its own accord.

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.

Since life consists of madness spiked with lies, the farther you are from each other the more lies you can put into it and the happier you'll be. That's only natural and normal. Truth is inedible.

Life is filigree work. What is written clearly is not worth much, it's the transparency that counts.

The foreground in a picture is always unattractive... Art demands that the interest of the canvas should be placed in the far distance, where lies take refuge, those dreams which blossom out of fact and are man's only love.

To philosophize is only another way of being afraid and leads hardly anywhere but to cowardly make-believe.

They came from the four corners of the earth, driven by hunger, plague, tumors, and the cold, and stopped here. They couldn’t go any futrther because of the ocean. That’s France, that’s the French people.

In circumstances of real tragedy you see things straight away...past, present, and future together.