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Louis-ferdinand Céline Quotes

Louis-Ferdinand Céline was the pen name of Louis Ferdinand Auguste Destouches , a French novelist, pamphleteer and physician. He developed a new style of writing that modernized French literature. His most famous work is the 1932 novel, Journey to the End of the Night.

Céline used a working-class, spoken style of language in his writings, and attacked what he considered to be the overly polished, "bourgeois" language of the "academy". His works influenced a broad array of literary figures, not only in France but also in the English-speaking world and elsewhere in the Western World; this includes authors associated with modernism, existentialism, black comedy and the Beat Generation.

However, Céline's vocal support for the Axis powers during the Second World War and his authorship of some offensively antisemitic pamphlets, has meant that his legacy as a cultural icon is a tangled one.

✵ 27. May 1894 – 1. July 1961
Louis-ferdinand Céline photo

Works

Journey to the End of the Night
Journey to the End of the Night
Louis-ferdinand Céline
North
Louis-ferdinand Céline
Death on Credit
Death on Credit
Louis-ferdinand Céline
Journey to the End of the Night
Journey to the End of the Night
Louis-ferdinand Céline
North
Louis-ferdinand Céline
Death on Credit
Death on Credit
Louis-ferdinand Céline
Louis-ferdinand Céline: 88 quotes12 likes

Famous Louis-ferdinand Céline Quotes

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

Louis-ferdinand Céline book Journey to the End of the Night

Source: Journey to the End of the Night

“Medicine is a thankless profession. When you get paid by the rich, you feel like a flunky, by the poor like a thief. How can you take a fee from people who can’t afford to eat or go to the movies? Especially when they’re at their last gasp. It’s not easy. You let it ride. You get soft-hearted. And your ship goes down.”

Louis-ferdinand Céline book Journey to the End of the Night

Source: Journey to the End of the Night

“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.”

Louis-ferdinand Céline book Journey to the End of the Night

Source: Journey to the End of the Night

“The best thing to do when you're in this world, don't you agree, is to get out of it. Crazy or not, scared or not.”

Louis-ferdinand Céline book Journey to the End of the Night

Source: Journey to the End of the Night (1932), Chapter 5
Context: Then I fell sick, I was delirious, driven mad by fear, they said at the hospital. Maybe so. The best thing to do when you're in this world, don't you agree, is to get out of it. Crazy or not, scared or not.

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

Louis-ferdinand Céline book Journey to the End of the Night

Source: Journey to the End of the Night (1932)

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

Louis-ferdinand Céline book Journey to the End of the Night

Source: Journey to the End of the Night

Louis-ferdinand Céline Quotes about people

“There's something sad about people going to bed. You can see they don't give a damn whether they're getting what they want out of life or not, you can see they don't even try to understand what we're here for. They just don't care.”

Louis-ferdinand Céline book Journey to the End of the Night

Source: Journey to the End of the Night

“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.”

Louis-ferdinand Céline book Journey to the End of the Night

Source: Journey to the End of the Night

“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.”

Louis-ferdinand Céline book Journey to the End of the Night

Source: Journey to the End of the Night

“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 book Journey to the End of the Night

Source: Journey to the End of the Night

“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.”

Louis-ferdinand Céline

Louis-ferdinand Céline Quotes about life

“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.”

Louis-ferdinand Céline

“Life must go on, even if it's no joke… just pretend to believe in the future.”

Louis-ferdinand Céline book North

Source: North

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

Louis-ferdinand Céline book Journey to the End of the Night

Source: Journey to the End of the Night

“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.”

Louis-ferdinand Céline book Journey to the End of the Night

Source: Journey to the End of the Night (1932), Chapter 3

“I believed in her body, I didn't believe in her soul. I though of Lola as a charming goldbrick, miles away from the war, miles away from life.”

Louis-ferdinand Céline book Journey to the End of the Night

Source: Journey to the End of the Night (1932), Chapter 5

Louis-ferdinand Céline: Trending quotes

“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!”

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 book Journey to the End of the Night

Source: Journey to the End of the Night (1932), Chapter 5

“There's no tyrant like a brain.”

Louis-ferdinand Céline book Journey to the End of the Night

Source: Journey to the End of the Night

Louis-ferdinand Céline Quotes

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

Louis-ferdinand Céline book Death on Credit

Source: Death on the Installment Plan

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

Louis-ferdinand Céline book Journey to the End of the Night

Source: Journey to the End of the Night

“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.”

Louis-ferdinand Céline book Journey to the End of the Night

Source: Journey to the End of the Night

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

Louis-ferdinand Céline book Journey to the End of the Night

Source: Journey to the End of the Night

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

Louis-ferdinand Céline book Journey to the End of the Night

Source: Journey to the End of the Night

“You can lose your way groping among the shadows of the past.”

Louis-ferdinand Céline book Journey to the End of the Night

Source: Journey to the End of the Night

“The beginning of genius is being scared shitless.”

Louis-ferdinand Céline

Source: The Church: A Comedy in Five Acts

“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.”

Louis-ferdinand Céline book Journey to the End of the Night

[6]
Source: Journey to the End of the Night (1932)

“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.”

Louis-ferdinand Céline book Journey to the End of the Night

Source: Journey to the End of the Night

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

Louis-ferdinand Céline

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

Louis-ferdinand Céline book Journey to the End of the Night

Source: Journey to the End of the Night

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

Louis-ferdinand Céline book Journey to the End of the Night

Source: Journey to the End of the Night

“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.”

Louis-ferdinand Céline book Journey to the End of the Night

Source: Journey to the End of the Night

“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.”

Louis-ferdinand Céline book Journey to the End of the Night

Source: Journey to the End of the Night

“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 book Journey to the End of the Night

[6]
Source: Journey to the End of the Night (1932)

“troubles are as endless as pleasures are brief…”

Louis-ferdinand Céline book North

Source: North

“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.”

Louis-ferdinand Céline book Journey to the End of the Night

Source: Journey to the End of the Night

“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.”

Louis-ferdinand Céline book Journey to the End of the Night

Source: Journey to the End of the Night

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

Louis-ferdinand Céline

“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.”

Louis-ferdinand Céline book Journey to the End of the Night

Source: Journey to the End of the Night

“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

50
L'Ecole des cadavres (1938)

“The natives, by and large, had to be driven to work with clubs, they preserved that much dignity, whereas the whites, perfected by public education, worked of their own free will.”

Louis-ferdinand Céline book Journey to the End of the Night

12
Journey to the End of the Night (1932)

“(Lola): Only mad men and cowards refuse to go to the war, when their homeland is in danger! - (Bardamu): So, hurrah for the mad men and the cowards!”

Louis-ferdinand Céline book Journey to the End of the Night

[6]
Journey to the End of the Night (1932)

“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

51
L'Ecole des cadavres (1938)

“The rich are inebriate in another way and cannot contrive to grasp these frenzied longings for security. To be rich is another form of intoxication: it spells forgetfulness. In fact, that is what one wants riches for: to forget.”

Louis-ferdinand Céline book Journey to the End of the Night

Journey to the End of the Night (1932)

“Our French Republic is no more than a great gullet swallowing the negroizing of the French at the command of the Jews. Our governors are a clique of sadistic yids and yellow-bellied masons sworn to swallow us up, to bastardize us further, to boil us down by all the grotesque, primitive means of inter-mixture, part negro, part yellow, part white, part red, part monkey, part Jewish, part everything.”

Louis-ferdinand Céline

219
L'Ecole des cadavres (1938)

“And the music came back with the carnival, the music you've heard as far back as you can remember, ever since you were little, that's always playing somewhere, in some corner of the city, in little country towns, wherever poor people go and sit at the end of the week to figure out what's become of them, sometimes here, sometimes there, from season to season, it tinkles and grinds out the tunes that rich people danced to the year before. It's the mechanical music that floats down from the wooden horses, from the cars that aren't cars anymore, from the railways that aren't at all scenic, from the platform under the wrestler who hasn't any muscles and doesn't come from Marseille, from the beardless lady, the magician who's a butter-fingered jerk, the organ that's not made of gold, the shooting gallery with the empty eggs. It's the carnival made to delude the weekend crowd. We go in and drink the beer with no head on it. But under the cardboard trees the stink of the waiter's breath is real. And the change he gives you has several peculiar coins in it, so peculiar that you go on examining them for weeks and weeks and finally, with considerable difficulty, palm them off on some beggar. What do you expect at the carnival? Gotta have what fun you can between hunger and jail, and take things as they come. No sense complaining, we're sitting down aren't we? Which ain't to be sneezed at. I saw the same old Gallery of the Nations, the one Lola caught sight of years and years ago on that avenue in the park of Saint-Cloud. You always see things again at carnivals, they revive the joy of past carnivals. Over the years the crowds must have come back time and again to stroll on the main avenue of the park of Saint-Cloud…taking it easy. The war had been over long ago. And say I wonder if that shooting gallery still belonged to the same owner? Had he come back alive from the war? I take an interest in everything. Those are the same targets, but in addition, they're shooting at airplanes now. Novelty. Progress. Fashion. The wedding was still there, the soldier too, and the town hall with its flag. Plus a few more things to shoot at than before.”

Louis-ferdinand Céline book Journey to the End of the Night

27
Journey to the End of the Night (1932)

“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

128
L'Ecole des cadavres (1938)

“I cannot refrain from doubting that there exist other genuine realizations of our deepest character than war and illness, those two infinities of nightmare. [39]”

Louis-ferdinand Céline book Journey to the End of the Night

Journey to the End of the Night (1932)

“The one thing any of us really cared about was living for one more hour, one more hour is a big deal in a world where everything has reduced itself to murder.”

Louis-ferdinand Céline book Journey to the End of the Night

Source: Journey to the End of the Night (1932), Chapter 4

“Hate gave birth to the slang; Slang (‘argot’) exists not anymore.”

Louis-ferdinand Céline

( « L'argot est né de la haine, il n'existe plus» Arts, 6. February 1957. in À l’agité du bocal et autres textes, (op. cit.) p. 55.

“The one who talks about the future is a rascal. The present is the only thing that matters. To invoke one’s posterity is to make a speech to maggots.”

Louis-ferdinand Céline book Journey to the End of the Night

4
Journey to the End of the Night (1932)

“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 book Journey to the End of the Night

[6]
Journey to the End of the Night (1932)

“I should be able to get the alligators to dance to the tune of the pan pipe.”

Louis-ferdinand Céline

March 30, 1947
Source: Letters to Milton Hindus (1947-1949), Les Cahiers de la NRF, Gallimard ISBN 2070134296

“The judeo-Americans are notorious idiots, bellylanding in foolishness: look at Roosevelt, Otto Khan, Morgenthau, Filene, Barush, Rosenthal…Observe these cunts.”

Louis-ferdinand Céline

75
L'Ecole des cadavres (1938)

“We are, by nature, so futile that distraction alone can prevent us from dying altogether.”

Louis-ferdinand Céline book Journey to the End of the Night

17
Journey to the End of the Night (1932)

“Your system of producing wealth, factories, mines, cooperatives will fall apart, like everything else, under the attacks of the people, in the delirious, popular boulimia.”

Louis-ferdinand Céline

101
L'Ecole des cadavres (1938)

“You can be a virgin in horror the same as in sex.”

Louis-ferdinand Céline book Journey to the End of the Night

Source: Journey to the End of the Night (1932), Chapter 2

“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

145
L'Ecole des cadavres (1938)

“I clearly see you a tapeworm, but not a cobra, not a cobra at all…no good at the flute! (…) I’ll go applaud you when you finally become a true monster, when you’ll have paid them, the witches, what you have to, their price, so they transmute you, blossom you, into a true phenomenon. Into a tapeworm that plays the flute.”

Louis-ferdinand Céline

To the Fidgeting Lunatic
in Albert Paraz, Le Gala des Vaches, Éditions de l’Élan, Paris, 1948 ; À l'agité du bocal, et autres textes de L.-F. Céline, l'Herne / Carnets de l'Herne ISBN 9782851976567 2006, 85 p. ; To the Fidgeting Lunatic (Céline on Sartre), translation by Constantin Rigas.

“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

99
Mea culpa; suivi de la vie et l'oeuvre de Semmelweis (1937)

“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

102
L'Ecole des cadavres (1938)

“Love is infinity - come down to poodles'level.”

Louis-ferdinand Céline book Journey to the End of the Night

1
Journey to the End of the Night (1932)

“It's harder to lose the wish to love than the wish to live.”

Louis-ferdinand Céline book Journey to the End of the Night

7
Journey to the End of the Night (1932)

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

Louis-ferdinand Céline

Des pays où personne ne va jamais. Interview of February 1960 with Jean Guenot und Jacques d'Arribehaude.
Reported in Céline à Meudon : transcriptions des entretiens avec Jacques d'Arribehaude et Jean Guenot. Éditions Jean Guenot, 1995 ISBN 2-85405-058-4

“Anybody who talks about the future is a bastard, it's the present that counts.”

Louis-ferdinand Céline book Journey to the End of the Night

Source: Journey to the End of the Night (1932), Chapter 4

“[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. [177]”

Louis-ferdinand Céline

L'Ecole des cadavres (1938)

“A woman who spends her time worrying about pregnancy is a virtual cripple; she'll never go very far.”

Louis-ferdinand Céline book Journey to the End of the Night

[7]
Journey to the End of the Night (1932)

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