Louis de Bernières Quotes

22 Sourced Quotes

The human heart likes a little disorder in its geometry.

Louis de Bernières
Did you know that childhood is the only time in our lives when insanity is not only permitted to us, but expected?

Louis de Bernières
Fascism is fundamentally and at bottom an aesthetic conception, and... it is your function as creators of beautiful things to portray with the greatest efficacy the sublime beauty and inevitable reality of the Fascist ideal.

Louis de Bernières
It's stupid to claim that one human being is special, or picked out by God, when in fact there are hundreds of millions of human beings in the world, and God knows how many millions of people long dead who have been lost to history, all of whom were probably special to someone.

Louis de Bernières
It seems that everyone has their own inexplicable fear to have nightmares about. We need nightmares to keep ourselves entertained, and fend off the contentment that we all fear and abhor so much.

Louis de Bernières
He gets into the habit of thinking so passionately at night that he begins to be persecuted by insomnia.

Louis de Bernières
Beauty is precious, you see, and the more beautiful something is, the more precious it is; and the more precious it is the more it hurts us that it will fade away; and the more we are hurt by beauty, the more we love the world.

Louis de Bernières
But then the general trouble with ignorance is always that the ignorant person has no idea that that's what they are. You can be ignorant and stupid and go through your whole life without ever encountering any evidence against the hypothesis that you're a genius.

Louis de Bernières
Love itself is what is left over when being in love has burned away.

Louis de Bernières
Love is not breathlessness; It is not excitement; It is not the promulgation of promises of eternal passion. That is just being in love, which any of us can convince ourselves we are. Love itself is what is left over when being in love has burned away, and this is both an art and a fortunate accident.

Louis de Bernières
Every Greek, man, woman, and child, has two Greeks inside. We even have technical terms for them. They are a part of us, as inevitable as the fact that we all write poetry and the fact that every one of us thinks that he knows everything that there is to know.

Louis de Bernières
The garden where you sit Has never a need of flowers, For you are the blossoms And only a fool or the blind Would fail to know it

Louis de Bernières
[She] knew that it was not precisely a body that one loved. One loved the man who shone out through the eyes and used its mouth to smile and speak.

Louis de Bernières
We should care for each other more than we care for ideas, or else we will end up killing each other.

Louis de Bernières
It's a fact of life that the honour of a family derives from the conduct of its women. I don't know why this is, and possibly matters are different elsewhere. But we live here, and I note the fact scientifically in the same way that I observe that there is snow on Mt Aenos in January and that we have no rivers.

Louis de Bernières
Remember that fear causes to happen the very things it fears. That's why fear should be unknown to us.

Louis de Bernières
The trouble with fulfilling your ambitions is you think you will be transformed into some sort of archangel and you're not. You still have to wash your socks.

Louis de Bernières
Love is a kind of dementia with very precise and oft-repeated clinical symptoms.

Louis de Bernières
God is an oppressor, He is incapable of human sympathy; behind a smiling face He hides an evil heart.

Louis de Bernières
The real index of civilization is when people are kinder than they need be.

Louis de Bernières
A guilty man wishes only to be understood, because to be understood is to appear to be forgiven.

Louis de Bernières
How strange that the world should change because of words, and words change because of the world

Louis de Bernières