Louis-Ferdinand Céline Quotes

50 Sourced Quotes

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

Louis-Ferdinand Céline
Experience is a dim lamp, which only lights the one who bears it.

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

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

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

Louis-Ferdinand Céline
Those who talk about the future are scoundrels. It is the present that matters. To evoke one's posterity is to make a speech to maggots.

Louis-Ferdinand Céline
I cannot refrain from doubting that there exist other genuine realizations of our deepest character than war and illness, those two infinities of nightmare.

Louis-Ferdinand Céline
It is in the United States that one may better see, if one has the taste for it, the vast Jewish panic, the mad anguish that strangles, the camouflaged arrogance, at the slightest evocation of a possibility of their regulation for the general world-wide good.

Louis-Ferdinand Céline
You [Jews] terrify no one. The sun sinks, you swank about to the right, to the left. Europe forms up against you.

Louis-Ferdinand Céline
In the kingdom of the "fallen in the shit" the lunatics are king.

Louis-Ferdinand Céline
Since the end of the period of belief, leaders exalt every defect, every kind of sadism, and gain all the more through their vices: vanity, ambition, war, death in a word.

Louis-Ferdinand Céline
In democratic politics it is money that commands. And the money is Jewish.

Louis-Ferdinand Céline
Politics has putrified mankind more profoundly in the last three centuries than in the whole of pre-history. We were more united in the middle ages than we are today; then a common spirit took form.

Louis-Ferdinand Céline
The populace is a true museum of all the stupidities of the ages: it swallows everything, it admires everything, it preserves everything, it defends everything, it understands nothing.

Louis-Ferdinand Céline
The three radios, the six cars, the four refrigerators, the seven telephones in each of the 300,000 Jewish households, and the super-television!

Louis-Ferdinand Céline
I should be able to get the alligators to dance to the tune of the pan pipe.

Louis-Ferdinand Céline
You pin-heads, you have not understood in communism its admirable, instantaneous manner of appeasing all your ruined tax-payer grudges ferociously, in the name of a new purity, a non-existent proletarian virtue, you deceived jackals. Your intimate personal plan won't wash. I am well acquainted with you.

Louis-Ferdinand Céline
... personally I find Hitler, Franco, Mussolini fabulously debonaire, admirably magnanimous, infinitely more sympathetic... than 250 Nobel Prize winners.

Louis-Ferdinand Céline
A woman who spends her time worrying about pregnancy is a virtual cripple; she'll never go very far.―

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

Louis-Ferdinand Céline
In this society which we are induced to frequent, composed above all of politicians and artists, one cannot realize one's true worth.

Louis-Ferdinand Céline
Spiritually we are at ground zero, sunk, bored to perdition. All our arts prove it. Since the renaissance, so mechanized, we repeat with almost futile variants the same hackneyed sentimentalities (we call them eternal values!) Love! Re-love No Love! More Love!

Louis-Ferdinand Céline
... the material bungling, the ladder-climbing and the shit, you are going marvelously to be served! Shitty! You yourselves are promised to the revolutionary puppies! Bulging eyed, abberant, pontificating, cock-up cancers, you committed at the outset the capital, inexpiable mistake: you have bet according to your guts, you have adulated, exalted, fawned on and glorified your tripes.

Louis-Ferdinand Céline
[The press from right to left, is corrupt. It will say anything if the bribe is large enough]... gloss over events according to the color of the subsidy, undress, attack, traduce, rant, all according to the sum in the envelope.

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

Louis-Ferdinand Céline
Everything interesting takes place in the dark; there is no doubt about it. We know nothing of the true story of the men. ―

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

Louis-Ferdinand Céline
It's harder to lose the wish to love than the wish to live.

Louis-Ferdinand Céline
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.

Louis-Ferdinand Céline
In the kitchens of love, after all, vice is like the pepper in a good sauce; it brings out the flavour, it's indispensable. ―

Louis-Ferdinand Céline