196 Quotes by Louis-Ferdinand Céline

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

All that makes a lunatic are the very ordinary ideas of mankind shut up inside a man’s head.

If you aren’t rich you should always look useful.

A poor man in this world can be done to death in two main ways, by the absolute indifference of his fellows in peacetime or by their homicidal mania when there’s a war.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.