Louis-Ferdinand Celine
Experience is a dim lamp, which only lights the one who bears it.Collection: Experience
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.Collection: Forgiveness
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.Collection: War
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!
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.
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.
If you aren't rich you should always look useful.
Almost every desire a poor man has is a punishable offence.
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.
The beginning of genius is being scared shitless.Collection: Genius
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.Collection: Winning
I piss on you all from a considerable height.Collection: Climbing
An Immense hatred keeps me alive... i would live for a thousand years if i were certain of seeing the whole world croak.Collection: Years
Our journey is entirely imaginary. That is its strength.Collection: Journey
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!.Collection: Heart
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.Collection: Moving
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.Collection: Believe
Troubles are as endless as pleasures are brief.Collection: Trouble
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.Collection: People
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.Collection: Witty
To hell with reality! I want to die in music, not in reason or in prose.Collection: Reality
The more one is hated, I find, the happier one is.Collection: Hate
There's no tyrant like a brain.Collection: Tyrants
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.Collection: Lying
The plain truth, I may as well admit it, is that I've never been really right in the head.Collection: May
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.Collection: Dream
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.Collection: Life
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.Collection: Men
When men can hate without risk, their stupidity is easily convinced, the motives supply themselves.Collection: Hate
You can lose your way groping among the shadows of the past.Collection: Past
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.Collection: Long
It is of men, and of them only, that one should always be frightened.Collection: Fear
Love is the infinite placed within the reach of poodles. I have my dignity!Collection: Love Is
The sadness of the world has different ways of getting to people, but it seems to succeed almost every time.Collection: Sadness
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.Collection: Humble
Lots of men are like that, their artistic leanings never go beyond a weakness for shapely thighs.Collection: Men
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 myselfCollection: Pain
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.Collection: Anxiety
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.Collection: Taken
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.Collection: Intelligent
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.Collection: Love Is
In the kitchens of love, after all, vice is like the pepper in a good sauce; it brings out the flavor, it’s indispensable.Collection: Kitchen
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.Collection: Pain
My trouble is insomnia. If I had always slept properly, I'd never have written a line.Collection: Insomnia
When it becomes really impossible to get away and sleep, then the will to live evaporates of its own accord.Collection: Sleep
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.Collection: Letting Go
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.Collection: Lying
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.Collection: Talking