Top 35 Louis de Bernières Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “When you fall in love, it is a temporary madness. It erupts like an earthquake, and then it subsides. And when it subsides, you have to make a decision. You have to work out whether your roots are become so entwined together that it is inconceivable that you should ever part.”

— Louis de Bernières

2. “What keeps me going is my children.”

— Louis de Bernières

3. “No man is a man until he has been a soldier.”

— Louis de Bernières

4. “The real index of civilization is when people are kinder than they need to be.”

— Louis de Bernières

5. “Man is a bird without wings and a bird is a man without sorrow.”

— Louis de Bernières

6. “Love is a temporary madness. It erupts like an earthquake and then subsides.”

— Louis de Bernières

7. “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

8. “Your lips are like sugar And your cheeks an apple Your breasts are paradise And your body a lily. O, to kiss the sugar To bite the apple To reveal paradise And open the lily.”

— Louis de Bernières

9. “Women only nag when they feel unappreciated.”

— Louis de Bernières

10. “Money has no religion except itself.”

— Louis de Bernières

11. “The human heart likes a little disorder in its geometry.”

— Louis de Bernières

12. “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

13. “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

14. “Compared to a novel, a film is like an economy pizza where there are no olives, no ham, no anchovies, no mushrooms, and all you’ve got is the dough.”

— Louis de Bernières

15. “In reality the world is as full of bad mothers as it is of bad fathers, and it is not the motherless children who become delinquent but the fatherless ones.”

— Louis de Bernières

16. “History is the propaganda of the victors.”

— Louis de Bernières

17. “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

18. “Love delayed is lust augmented.”

— Louis de Bernières

19. “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

20. “God is an oppressor, He is incapable of human sympathy; behind a smiling face He hides an evil heart.”

— Louis de Bernières

21. “Symmetry is for God, not for us.”

— Louis de Bernières

22. “An adversarial family law system raises the stakes unnecessarily high, exacerbates the antagonism of the couples concerned, and is directly responsible for making it impossible for couples who would otherwise have reconciled to do so.”

— Louis de Bernières

23. “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

24. “We had roots that grew towards each other underground, and when all the pretty blossom had fallen from our branches we found that we were one tree and not two.” Louis de Bernieres as quoted in Underland by Robert Macfarlane.”

— Louis de Bernières

25. “The De Bernieres were very military. I broke the military tradition but I was terribly proud of my father being a soldier.”

— Louis de Bernières

26. “We should care for each other more than we care for ideas, or else we will end up killing each other.”

— Louis de Bernières

27. “I used to have nightmare about having petrol poured over me, and being set on fire, and nowadays I have nightmares that I have wooden teeth and that they are continually falling out, as if I had an infinite number of them. 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

28. “Love is a kind of dementia with very precise and oft-repeated clinical symptoms.”

— Louis de Bernières

29. “Family law is institutionally anti-male. I’ve been lobbying MPs, and I’m not going to give up campaigning for equality until I get equality.”

— Louis de Bernières

30. “Remember that fear causes to happen the very things it fears. That’s why fear should be unknown to us.”

— Louis de Bernières

31. “How strange that the world should change because of words, and words change because of the world.”

— Louis de Bernières

32. “When you have children it completely shifts your focus; they become the most passionate love of your life.”

— Louis de Bernières

33. “So the news that divorced fathers are to be denied a legal right to a relationship with their children, in the long overdue review of family law published this week, fills me with horror and despair.”

— Louis de Bernières

34. “He gets into the habit of thinking so passionately at night that he begins to be persecuted by insomnia.”

— Louis de Bernières

35. “People taking photographs of their meals are not critics; they are from the United States.”

— Louis de Bernières

36. “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

37. “Like many men, I am not ashamed to admit that my principal joys are domestic. I love cooking, and I love looking after my children. Indeed, the times that I have with them are the only ones when I feel unconditionally happy.”

— Louis de Bernières

38. “We have roots that grow towards each other underground. And when all the pretty blossom has fallen from our branches we find that we are one tree and not two.”

— Louis de Bernières