Truth is a pain which will not stop. And the truth of this world is to die. You must choose: either dying or lying. Personally, I have never been able to kill myself
Interpretation
This quote illustrates the anguish of facing harsh truths, particularly mortality, and the struggle between accepting reality or escaping it with deceit.
Louis-Ferdinand Celine's quote confronts the painful nature of truth, particularly the truth of our own mortality. It highlights the existential dilemma of choosing between the discomfort that comes with acknowledging life's realities and the temptation to evade those truths through lies. Celine suggests a deep personal struggle with the concept of death, revealing a preference for honesty, even if it brings suffering, over the false comfort of denial.
In practice
During a philosophical debate, one might use this quote to emphasize the importance of confronting uncomfortable truths.
Not much music left inside us for life to dance to. Our youth has gone to the ends of the earth to die in the silence of the truth. And where, I ask you, can a man escape to, when he hasn't enough madness left inside him? The truth is an endless death agony. The truth is death. You have to choose: death or lies. I've never been able to kill myself.
To travel is very useful, it makes the imagination work, the rest is just delusion and pain. Our journey is entirely imaginary, which is its strength.
In the kitchens of love, after all, vice is like the pepper in a good sauce; it brings out the flavor, it’s indispensable.
Reason died in 1914, November 1914 ... after that everybody began to rave.
Poor people never, or hardly ever, ask for an explanation of all they have to put up with. They hate one another, and content themselves with that.
To hell with reality! I want to die in music, not in reason or in prose. People don't deserve the restraint we show by not going into delirium in front of them. To hell with them!
Freedom would be not to choose between black and white but to abjure such prescribed choices.
The person who does not believe in miracles surely makes it certain that he or she will never take part in one.
Why should our bodies end at the skin, or include at best other beings encapsulated by skin?
In my experience, many Americans think of religion as important and want to do whatever they can to support it. But if you ask them what they themselves believe, you'll find they're very uncertain about their religious beliefs. They don't actually accept the theology of their official church.
If we are to keep democracy, there must be a commandment: Thou shalt not ration justice.
How vulgar, this hankering after immortality, how vain, how false. Composers are merely scribblers of cave paintings. One writes music because winter is eternal and because, if one didn't, the wolves and blizzards would be at one's throat all the sooner.
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