Blaise Cendrars famous quotes

Last updated: Sep 5, 2024

Humanity lives in its fiction.
-- Blaise Cendrars

#Humanity #Fiction
Only a soul full of despair can ever attain serenity and, to be in despair, you must have loved a good deal and still love the world.
-- Blaise Cendrars

#Serenity #Soul #Despair
Without the help of selfishness, the human animal would never have developed. Egoism is the vine by which man hoisted himself out of the swamp and escaped from the jungle.
-- Blaise Cendrars

#Animal #Men #Selfishness
Writing is to descend like a miner to the depths of the mine with a lamp on your forehead, a light whose dubious brightness falsifies everything, whose wick is in permanent danger of explosion, whose blinking illumination in the coal dust exhausts and corrodes your eyes.
-- Blaise Cendrars

#Writing #Eye #Light
Science is history arranged according to the superstition and taste of the moment. The vocabulary of scholars has no wit, no salt. These heavy tomes have no soul, they are filled with distress...
-- Blaise Cendrars

#Vocabulary #Soul #Superstitions
For action, whatever its immediate purpose, also implies relief at doing something, anything, and the joy of exertion. This is the optimism that is inherent in, and proper and indispensable to action, for without it nothing would ever be undertaken. It in no way suppresses the critical sense or clouds the judgment. On the contrary this optimism sharpens the wits, it creates a certain perspective and, at the last moment, lets in a ray of perpendicular light which illuminates all one's previous calculations, cuts and shuffles them and deals you the card of success, the winning number.
-- Blaise Cendrars

#Cutting #Winning #Clouds
I used the word 'prose' in the Trans-Siberian in the early Latin sense of prosa dictu. Poem seemed to me too pretentious, too narrow. Prose is more open, popular.
-- Blaise Cendrars

#Latin #Pretentious #Used
A mud-stained sunlight began to splatter the sodden fields, and the hateful, nasal world of birds began to come to life. It seemed to me that I was coming out of a suffocating nightmare and that the low clouds flying before the wind were the shreds of an evil dream.
-- Blaise Cendrars

#Dream #Clouds #Wind
One's life, from being an exterior thing, grows inwards. Its intensity stays the same; and, d'you know, it's most mysterious, the corners in which the joy of living can sometimes hide away.
-- Blaise Cendrars

#Joy #Mysterious #Sometimes
what are you looking for? There is no Truth. There's only action, action obeying a million different impulses, ephemeral action, action subjected to every possible and imaginable contingency and contradiction, Life. Life is crime, theft, jealousy, hunger, lies, disgust,stupidity, sickness, volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, piles of corpses. what can you do about it, my poor friend?
-- Blaise Cendrars

#Lying #Earthquakes #Stupidity
Life The machine The human soul A 75mm breech My portrait
-- Blaise Cendrars

#Soul #Portraits #Machines
My poor life This shawl Frayed on strongboxes full of gold I roll along with Dream And smoke And the only flame in the universe
-- Blaise Cendrars

#Dream #Flames #Gold
I'm not an extraordinary worker, I'm an extraordinary daydreamer. I exceed all my fantasies-even that of writing.
-- Blaise Cendrars

#Writing #Fantasy #Workers

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