Blaise Cendrars Quotes

• Humanity lives in its fiction.

  Blaise Cendrars

  Humanity, Fiction

  50 Copy quote

• 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

  Jealousy, Lying, Volcanoes

  189 Copy quote

• 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

  23 Copy quote

• The single fact of existing is already a true happiness.

  Blaise Cendrars

  Facts, True Happiness

  17 Copy quote

• 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

  19 Copy quote

• 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

  13 Copy quote

• Writing is a noble privilege compared with the lot of most people, who live like parts of a machine, who live only to keep the gears of society pointlessly turning.

  Blaise Cendrars

  Writing, People, Machines

  10 Copy quote

• 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

  13 Copy quote

• 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

  Eye, Writing, Light

  7 Copy quote

• 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, Numbers

  14 Copy quote

• Life The machine The human soul A 75mm breech My portrait

  Blaise Cendrars

  Soul, Portraits, Machines

  Blaise Cendrars (1966). “Selected writings”

  9 Copy quote

• A writer should never install himself before a panorama, however grandiose it may be.

  Blaise Cendrars

  May, Should, Panorama

  13 Copy quote

• 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

  7 Copy quote

• 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

  Blaise Cendrars (1993). “Complete Poems”, p.18, Univ of California Press

  6 Copy quote

• Photogenic is a stupid, nonsensical word, but it is also a great mystery.

  Blaise Cendrars

  Stupid, Mystery, Nonsensical

  45 Copy quote

• 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

  5 Copy quote

• 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

  4 Copy quote

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