Top 60 Louis-Ferdinand Céline Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “There’s no tyrant like a brain.”

— Louis-Ferdinand Céline

2. “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.”

— Louis-Ferdinand Céline

3. “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

4. “Life is filigree work. What is written clearly is not worth much, it’s the transparency that counts.”

— Louis-Ferdinand Céline

5. “Our journey is entirely imaginary. That is its strength.”

— Louis-Ferdinand Céline

6. “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.”

— Louis-Ferdinand Céline

7. “The beginning of genius is being scared shitless.”

— Louis-Ferdinand Céline

8. “All great innovations are built on rejections.”

— Louis-Ferdinand Céline

9. “Most people die at the last minute; others twenty years beforehand, some even earlier. They are the wretched of the earth.”

— Louis-Ferdinand Céline

10. “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

11. “The more one is hated, I find, the happier one is.”

— Louis-Ferdinand Céline

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

— Louis-Ferdinand Céline

13. “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

14. “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

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

— Louis-Ferdinand Céline

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

— Louis-Ferdinand Céline

17. “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

18. “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.”

— Louis-Ferdinand Céline

19. “The sadness of the world has different ways of getting to people, but it seems to succeed almost every time.”

— Louis-Ferdinand Céline

20. “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

21. “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

22. “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.”

— Louis-Ferdinand Céline

23. “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.”

— Louis-Ferdinand Céline

24. “To hell with reality! I want to die in music, not in reason or in prose.”

— Louis-Ferdinand Céline

25. “For the poor of this world, two major ways of expiring are available: either by the absolute indifference of your fellow-men in peace-time, or by the homicidal passion of these same when war breaks out.”

— Louis-Ferdinand Céline

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

— Louis-Ferdinand Céline

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

— Louis-Ferdinand Céline

28. “Almost every desire a poor man has is a punishable offence.”

— Louis-Ferdinand Céline

29. “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

30. “All in all, death is something like marriage.”

— Louis-Ferdinand Céline

31. “Women always have some mental reservation.”

— Louis-Ferdinand Céline

32. “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

33. “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

34. “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

35. “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

36. “People avenge themselves for the favors done them.”

— Louis-Ferdinand Céline

37. “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.”

— Louis-Ferdinand Céline

38. “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.”

— Louis-Ferdinand Céline

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

— Louis-Ferdinand Céline

40. “The whole business of your life overwhelms you when you live alone. One’s stupefied by it. To get rid of it you try to daub some of it off on to people who come to see you, and they hate that. To be alone trains one for death.”

— Louis-Ferdinand Céline

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

— Louis-Ferdinand Céline

42. “They came from the four corners of the earth, driven by hunger, plague, tumors, and the cold, and stopped here. They couldn’t go any futrther because of the ocean. That’s France, that’s the French people.”

— Louis-Ferdinand Céline

43. “In the kitchens of love, after all, vice is like the pepper in a good sauce; it brings out the flavor, it’s indispensable.”

— Louis-Ferdinand Céline

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

— Louis-Ferdinand Céline

45. “The mind is satisfied with phrased, but not the body, the body is more fastidious, it wants muscles. A body always tells the truth, that’s why it’s usually depressing and disgusting to look at.”

— Louis-Ferdinand Céline

46. “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

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

— Louis-Ferdinand Céline

48. “Love, Arthur, is a poodle’s chance of attaining the infinite, and personally I have my pride.”

— Louis-Ferdinand Céline

49. “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.”

— Louis-Ferdinand Céline

50. “History doesn’t pass the dishes again.”

— Louis-Ferdinand Céline