Louis-Ferdinand Celine Quotes

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.

There's no such thing as intelligent vanity. It's an instinct. And you'll never find a man who is not first and foremost vain.

Well, you know... experience is a muffled lantern that throws light only on the bearer...it's incommunicable.

An Immense hatred keeps me alive... i would live for a thousand years if i were certain of seeing the whole world croak.

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.

To hell with reality! I want to die in music, not in reason or in prose.

I piss on you all from a considerable height.

Our journey is entirely imaginary. That is its strength.

The more one is hated, I find, the happier one is.

The plain truth, I may as well admit it, is that I've never been really right in the head.

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.

Almost every desire a poor man has is a punishable offence.

All that makes a lunatic are the very ordinary ideas of mankind shut up inside a man's head.

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.

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.

All great innovations are built on rejections.

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

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

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.

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

If it is your duty to croak like the toad, then go ahead! And with all your might! Make them hear you!

People avenge themselves for the favors done them.

If you aren't rich you should always look useful.

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.

Troubles are as endless as pleasures are brief.

The beginning of genius is being scared shitless.

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

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

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

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

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.

That is perhaps what we seek throughout life, that and nothing more, the greatest possible sorrow so as to become fully ourselves before dying.

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.

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.

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.

Only a complete alcoholic can think life is funny ... any life!.

Love, Arthur, is a poodle's chance of attaining the infinite, and personally I have my pride.

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

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.

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

There's no tyrant like a brain.

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

I was a hundred-percent sick, I felt as if I had no further use for my legs, they just hung over the edge of my bed like unimportant and rather ridiculous objects.

History doesn't pass the dishes again.

All in all, death is something like marriage.

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

When you stop to examine the way in which our words are formed and uttered, our sentences are hard-put to it to survive the disaster of their slobbery origins.

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.