Quotes by "Romain Gary"

Humor is an affirmation of dignity, a declaration of man's superiority to all that befalls him.

Humour is an affirmation of dignity, a declaration of man's superiority to all that befalls him.

He threw Scholscher a challenging glance. The major was thinking of the motives that could drive a man like Haas to live alone for twenty-five years among the elephants of Lake Chad. It was again that spark of misanthropy which most people carry in them, a presentiment of some different and better company than their own kind, a spark that sometimes blazes up and takes astonishing, unpredictable and explosive forms. He thought also of the old Chinese who never move without their pet grasshoppers, of the Tunisians who take their caged birds to the cafe with them, and of Colonel Babcock who spent hours with his eyes fixed on a jumping bean, which kept him company. He was slightly astonished to hear that Haas believed in God — there seemed to be a contradiction there; it’s true, he thought, taking a pull at his pipe, that God hasn’t got a cold muzzle a man can touch when he feels lonely, that one can’t stroke Him behind the ears, that He doesn’t wag His tail at the sight of you every morning, and that you cannot catch sight of Him trotting over the hills with His ears flapping and His trunk in the air. One can’t even hold Him in one’s hand like a nice warm pipe, and since a spell on earth after all lasts fifty or sixty years, it’s perfectly understandable that people should end by buying themselves a pipe or a jumping bean.

I wondered — and I finally reached the conclusion that the Lebanese was a man who was in love with life, and that his carefree, enormous laugh— head thrown back, eyes closed in a grimace of mirth — celebrated a perfect, a total understanding between the two, an agreement which nothing ever managed to disturb: happiness, in fact. A beautiful affair: life and Habib were inseparable.

To 'live', to be truly alive, it is not enough simply to breathe, to suffer, nor even to be happy; life is a secret that cannot be discovered on one’s own. True living is done in pairs.

Slowly I felt flooded with that agonizing and poignant confusion that surely comes to all aging men experiencing their first adolescent love. I had no great wish to go on living; what was the point of a flawed happiness. According to Bonnard, the hardest moment of all is when the artist longs to keep on but he’s conscience tells him that one brushstroke more will spoil the entire painting. And man has to know when to stop.

Perhaps, there was something missing in me, a lack of empathy without which even love and happiness are merely a part of that struggle toward championship.

My love, I caught sight of you a few moments ago, deep in conversation with a very sober-looking man, and I thought here is a bureaucrat sent by Reality to demand a full accounting, to investigate us on suspicion of fraud... on suspicion of being happy. Yes, there is something scandalous, something privileged and elitist about our love, because two people happily in love always turn their backs on the world; and so I am afraid. (From Laura’s note).

The dominant strain of the twentieth century, whether emanating from Marx or Freud, has been self-awareness; we have lost the art of forgetting ourselves. Which means we have little chance of being happy, since so much of happiness consists of inner peace; of playing ostrich, in fact. To say nothing of the fact that all this psychological self-consciousness is rather vulgar...

Laura is adorable, father. But she is made for enjoyment of life, for gaiety, happiness. You must realize that these are not the qualities upon which one can found a family...

A man lives on hope. He keeps thinking things will somehow straighten themselves out.

This was what he stood for: a world where there would be room enough even for such a mass of clumsy and cumbersome freedom. A margin of humanity, of tolerance, where some of life’s beauty could take refuge. His eyes narrowed a little, and an ironic, bitter smile came to his lips. I know you all, he thought. Today you say that elephants are archaic and cumbersome, that they interfere with roads and telegraph poles, and tomorrow you’ll begin to say that human rights too are obsolete and cumbersome, that they interfere with progress, and the temptation will be so great to let them fall by the road and not to burden ourselves with that extra load. And in the end man himself will become in your eyes a clumsy luxury, an archaic survival from the past, and you’ll dispense with him too, and the only thing left will be total efficiency and universal slavery and man himself will disappear under the weight of his material achievement. He had learned that much behind the barbed wire of the forced labor camp: it was our education, a lesson be was not prepared to forget.

I aimed as well as I could.' 'So as not to kill?' ''You never teach a man anything by killing him. On the contrary, you make him forget everything.

Obstacles must not be placed in the way of pure and scientific research, whatever the consequences may be. The practical results do not matter. What counts is the free and disinterested disinterested of the genius of man.' 'In other words, if a scientist blew up the whole earth or poisoned it to the core, this would be a free and disinterested manifestation of the genius of man?' He refused to join his questioner in taking such a pessimistic view. Scientific research must remain completely free from any consideration of possible practical consequences.

They had spent a few years in Paris, but they had still to undergo a real education — one which no school, lycee or university could supply: they had still to undergo their education in suffering. Then they’d be ready to understand what this was all about.