Top 60 Romain Gary Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “I’ve had a lot of fun. Good-bye, and thank you.”

— Romain Gary

Featured in: Grateful Quotes, Quitting Quotes, Fun Quotes

2. “Reality is not an inspiration for literature. At its best, literature is an inspiration for reality.”

— Romain Gary

3. “I see History as a relay race in which one of us, before dropping in his tracks, must carry one stage further the challenge of being a man.”

— Romain Gary

4. “The trouble with hysteria is that it’s contagious.”

— Romain Gary

5. “Look, what do you think it matters to me, all that – all that business of – of the body? Do you suppose I actually picked you, of my own free will? As if I’d gone out shopping and decided you were the best buy for the money? I had no choice at all... You’re you, and there’s no one, nothing else. We talk about ‘falling’ in love. Well, I ’fell.”

— Romain Gary

6. “Men sometimes die much earlier than they are burried.”

— Romain Gary

7. “The avantgarde are people who don’t exactly know where they want to go, but are the first to get there.”

— Romain Gary

8. “If the world can no longer afford the luxury of natural beauty, then it will soon be overcome and destroyed by its own ugliness.”

— Romain Gary

9. “It’s absolutely essential that man should manage to preserve something other than what helps to make soles for shoes or sewing machines, that he should leave a margin, a sanctuary, where some of life’s beauty can take refuge and where he himself can feel safe from his own cleverness and folly. Only then will it be possible to begin talking of civilization.”

— Romain Gary

10. “The best way to defend yourself against the power of money is to have some.”

— Romain Gary

11. “When a war is won, it’s the losers, not the winners, who are liberated.”

— Romain Gary

12. “Sometimes I have the feeling that we live in a dubbed movie and everybody moves their lips but the voices don’t correspond. We are all post-synchronized and sometimes is very accomplished and looks natural.”

— Romain Gary

13. “To ‘live’, to be truly alive, it is not enough simply to breathe, to suffer, nor even to be happy; life is a secret that cannot be discovered on one’s own. True living is done in pairs.”

— Romain Gary

14. “Je crois que c’est les injustes qui dorment le mieux, parce qu’ils s’en foutent, alors que les justes ne peuvent pas fermer l’oeil et se font du mauvais sang pour tout.”

— Romain Gary

15. “I am weak, I say with no presumptions. I have no merit, I note it, that is all. There are times that I feel so weak there most be a mistake, and as I don’t know what I mean with this, I am not going to say anything else.”

— Romain Gary

16. “They thought I suffered from lack of exterior, when I suffered from excess of interior.”

— Romain Gary

17. “Humor is an affirmation of dignity, a declaration of man’s superiority to all that befalls him.”

— Romain Gary

18. “Loyalty is not the kind of exclusive deal, it’s just a sincere communication and the same values.”

— Romain Gary

19. “Disease-carrying thoughts swarm and multiply in the dark and twisted labyrinths of our minds, and all that is needed is a mob and a good political slogan for the epidemic to be spread once again, with a burst of automatic weapons or a mushroom cloud.”

— Romain Gary

20. “You are the only man I ever respected,′ she said. ‘But you haven’t aged well. You have stayed young. Men who stay young don’t age well.”

— Romain Gary

21. “If there is something that opens horizons, it is precisely ignorance.”

— Romain Gary

22. “Je n’avais encore jamais vu un sourire aussi immuable et je me demandais si elle l’enlevait pour dormir.”

— Romain Gary

23. “Literature is greater than any of us, dammit.”

— Romain Gary

24. “For a few minutes I tried to empty my mind entirely, to concentrate solely on breathing: sometimes it’s useful to rediscover simpler pleasures of life.”

— Romain Gary

25. “Printing mistakes adds value because of the probability calculus, which makes their intrusion into something problematic and almost impossible, even when everything’s conceived, precisely, to avoid the intrusion of human error.”

— Romain Gary

26. “He gave up. He’d been feeling like giving up for a long, long time. I guess it’s maturity, they say it always gets you in the end. I don’t seem to have any more principles left, so it’s got to be maturity... A broken man, I guess that’s what you become, the moment you are no longer a kid.”

— Romain Gary

27. “I don’t consider myself to be definite, but in waiting position and eventual appearance.”

— Romain Gary

28. “Bruno, someday you will die of kindness, tolerance and gentleness. Well, given the options, it isn’t a bad way to go.”

— Romain Gary

29. “A writer’s subconscious is one of the filthiest places there are: as a matter of fact, you can find the whole world there.”

— Romain Gary

30. “The difference between the English and the rest of mankind is that the English have long known the truth about themselves – which makes them always able to evade it discreetly, to slip round it.”

— Romain Gary

31. “The inhumanity of it is what makes Nazism so horrible – that’s what people always say. Sure. But there’s no denying the obvious: part of being human is the inhumanity of it. As long as we refuse to admit that inhumanity is completely human, we’ll just be telling ourselves pious lies.”

— Romain Gary

32. “Humor is a silent and polite dynamite which enables you to blow your own way of life sky-high every time you have had enough of it, yet with the maximum discretion and without making a mess.”

— Romain Gary

33. “There is more to Jewish history than Auschwitz.”

— Romain Gary

34. “Racism is when it doesn’t count. When they don’t count. When one can do anything with them, it doesn’t matter what, because they are not people like us. Do you see? Not our kind. When we can make use of them as we please, without losing face, dignity, honor. Without embarrassment, without making a moral judgement – that’s it. When we can make them do no matter what degrading work, service, because their opinion of us doesn’t count, because it cannot tarnish us. That’s what racism is.”

— Romain Gary

35. “My hints had, undoubtedly and unintentionally, made her feel insecure, guilty, inadequate, afraid that she was losing whatever it was that turned me on; in short, it aroused all the self-doubt so readily awakened in women after thousands of years of servitude. Hence my zeal in denying the effects of time was abetted by Laura’s complicity.”

— Romain Gary

36. “A man lives on hope. He keeps thinking things will somehow straighten themselves out.”

— Romain Gary

37. “I too have often felt the need to understand it all; but I know my limits. In my life I’ve done more suffering than thinking – though I believe one understands better that way.”

— Romain Gary

38. “She must have said to herself that one can always rely on a gentleman when it’s a question of not understanding a woman.”

— Romain Gary

39. “They died... Have you ever seen a baby elephant lying on its side, with its trunk inert, gazing at you with eyes in which there seem to have taken refuge all those so highly praised human qualities of which humanity is so largely devoid?”

— Romain Gary

40. “That night I hardly slept a wink, but turned over and over in my tent; never until then had I felt so alone or so deserted. Perhaps even the elephants are too small, I thought, as I stared into the darkness, and we need a far bigger and more affectionate presence at our side.”

— Romain Gary

41. “Small attentions make great friends.”

— Romain Gary

42. “I love you’, she said, to remind me that there was one answer to everything, and only one.”

— Romain Gary

43. “You can say anything you like about life, but one thing is certain: life doesn’t give a damn. It has never made any clear distinction between happiness and misery. It simply doesn’t watch where it’s going.”

— Romain Gary

44. “And I found myself falling off asleep, because in that half-awake state, one’s sensibilities are blunted and happiness can still hover nearby...”

— Romain Gary

45. “It’s a bad break, staying so young at heart.”

— Romain Gary

46. “Perhaps, there was something missing in me, a lack of empathy without which even love and happiness are merely a part of that struggle toward championship.”

— Romain Gary

47. “Besides, there’s nothing like the truth to make a convincing lie.”

— Romain Gary

48. “Never say die. You have to be mad, it’s true, to keep going and hope, but the first reptile who dragged his belly out of the water a million years ago to live on land without lungs and tried to breathe all the same – he too was mad. In the end the reptile became a man. We must always try to do the best we can – perhaps one day well become human, who knows.”

— Romain Gary

49. “No doubt about it: numbers are the future. The world’s been learning to count since the days of chivalry ended and it’s only going to get worse. We’re about to witness the end of everything that isn’t quantifiable – honor, for example.”

— Romain Gary

50. “The mythology of the superstud... ′ my friend, the poet Henti Drouille, had written on a slip of paper before putting a bullet in his head. His mistress cried out to me: ‘I don’t understand – I don’t understand! He was such a marvelous lover!’ True enough, so marvelous that she had noticed nothing. I saw in my mind the virile mask of Jim Daley and seemed to hear his voice saying: ‘She was probably the clitoral type. Sometimes, a man gets a break this way.’ No, one has to know when to stop.”

— Romain Gary