228 Quotes by Romain Gary

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.