Louis-Ferdinand Celine Quotations

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

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.

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

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.

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 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!

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

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.

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.

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

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

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!

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

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.

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

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

All great innovations are built on rejections.

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

People don't deserve the restraint we show by not going into delirium in front of them.

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.

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.

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.

For the poor of this world, two major ways of expiring are available: either by the absolute indifference of your fellow-men in peace-time, or by the homicidal passion of these same when war breaks out.

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.

This instinctive repulsion which tradespeople inspire in men of sensitive feeling is one of the very rare consolations for being so impoverished which are given to those of us who don’t sell anything to anybody.

There is no rest for the humble except in despising the great, whose only thought of the people is inspired by self-interest or sadism.

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.

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.

All in all, death is something like marriage.

Philosophizing is simply one way of being afraid, a cowardly pretense that doesn't get you anywhere.

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.

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.

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

Chin up, Ferdinand," I kept saying to myself, to keep up my courage. "What with being chucked out of everywhere, you're sure to find whatever it is that scares all those bastards so. It must be at the end of the night, and that's why they're so dead set against going to the end of the night.

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.

In my room I'd barely closed my eyes when the blonde from the movie house came along and sang her whole song of sorrow just for me. I helped her put me to sleep, so to speak, and succeeded pretty well... I wasn't entirely alone... It's not possible to sleep alone...

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.

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

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.

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.

There's no tyrant like a brain.

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

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! ...

The best way to make a sort of peace, a fragile armistice to be sure, but precious all the same, with men, officers or not, is to let them bask and wallow in childish self-glorification. There’s no such thing as intelligent vanity. It’s an instinct. And you’ll never find a man who is not first and formenost vain. The role of admiring doormat is about the only one that one man is glad to tolerate in another. With these soldiers I had no need to tax my imagination.

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.

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.

We never change. Neither our socks nor our masters nor our opinions, or we're so slow about it that it's no use. We were born loyal and that's what killed us! Soldiers free of charge, heroes for everyone else, talking monkeys, tortured words, we are the minions of King Misery...It's not a life.

The novel can't compete with cars, the movies, television, and liquor. A guy who's had a good feed and tanked up on good wine gives his old lady a kiss after supper and his day is over. Finished.

The beginning of genius is being scared shitless.

History doesn't pass the dishes again.

When men can hate without risk, their stupidity is easily convinced, the motives supply themselves.

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

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

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

People avenge themselves for the favors done them.

The mind is satisfied with phrased, but not the body, the body is more fastidious, it wants muscles. A body always tells the truth, that's why it's usually depressing and disgusting to look at.

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.

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

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 ...

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

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!

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 on the other hand, let’s not forget, but make it our business to record the worst of the 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.

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.

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.

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

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

Women always have some mental reservation.

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.

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! ...

Our journey is entirely imaginary. That is its strength.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

I piss on you all from a considerable height.

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

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.