Romain Gary Quotes

Gari in Russian means "burn!" ... I want to test myself, a trial by fire, so that my I is burned off. ~ Romain Gary

It wasn't true, the evidence was faked, but the odd thing is that, whether it s true or not, the consequences are the same: one large group of human beings
or another turned out to be triple-distilled sons-of-bitches, which proves that we all have it in us. Whether the Communists staged a diabolical lie or the Americans sowed plague in China, the one thing that matters is that, as a man, you're
in the gutter. Colonel Babcock. [...] Maybe the West is a civilization, but the Communists are an ugly truth about man. Don't accuse them of inhuman methods: everything about them is human. We're all one great, lovely zoological family, and we shouldn't forget it. That's how you came to be in the gutter Colonel and it's no use your taking refuge on an island and behaving like an ostrich - being English, I mean; the gutter is there, it's you, or rather in you; it flows in your veins. ~ Romain Gary

He gave up. He'd been feeling like giving up for a long, long time. I guess it's maturity, they say it always gets you in the end. I don't seem to have any more principles left, so it's got to be maturity ... A broken man, I guess that's what you become, the moment you are no longer a kid. ~ Romain Gary

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. ~ Romain Gary

I sat day after day in my little room, waiting for inspiration to visit me, trying to invent a pseudonym that would express, in a combination of noble and striking sounds, our dream of artistic achievement, a pen name grand enough to compensate for my own feeling of insecurity and helplessness at the idea of everything my mother expected from me. ~ Romain Gary

If there is something that opens horizons, it is precisely ignorance. ~ Romain Gary

I spend the next few days watching Maï die. I can't stand that voice, that protest. Katzenelenbogen shows up and explains in that rational, no-nonsense, doctoral tone that no one has the right to make such a fuss over a cat, while the whole world. . . . . I kick them out, both him and the world.
Maï is no longer a cat. She is a human being in agony. Every living thing that suffers is a human being.
She is cuddled in my arms, a small ball of lackluster fur, which gives her a horrible stuffed air already smacking of taxidermists. Every now and then she raises her head, looks at me inquiringly and miaows a question I understand, but am unable to answer. Our vocal cords are totally inadequate there.
What goings-on about a mere cat, huh? I hate your guts, you antisentimental, antiemotional, hardheaded rationalists. You are the ones who have raised the going rate of sensitivity. You have put all your emphasis on ideas, and ideas without "emotions" and without "sentimentalism," that's the world you have built, your work.
All the pseudo-people who have the Nazi arrogance to be reading this book make my hands ache for a grenade. ~ Romain Gary

All men have a legend because of death. Humanity wasn't legendary any longer: it was a myth. ~ Romain Gary

...the most sacred right of a person is to refuse o be manipulated, handled, cheated, and then kicked in the ass---. ~ Romain Gary

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

An unbearable reality, combined with the impossibility to change it, tends to lead to abstractions for abstraction's sake, and unreality becomes more realistic than reality itself, more true, more convincing, simply because it looks at you with the eyes of justice. ~ Romain Gary

Loyalty is not the kind of exclusive deal, it's just a sincere communication and the same values. ~ Romain Gary

The trouble with hysteria is that it's contagious. ~ Romain Gary

Literature has always been the last refuge, in this world, for those who do not know where to lay their dreaming heads. ~ Romain Gary

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. ~ Romain Gary

Some consciences are fitted with automatic answering machine that work very well. But I never got the technology under control ~ Romain Gary

As long as you live, you hope. You think that everything will just ... get better. ~ Romain Gary

They thought I suffered from lack of exterior, when I suffered from excess of interior ~ Romain Gary

Your generation is suffering from what for lack of a better word I shall call over-debunk. There was a lot of debunking that had to be done, of course. Bigotry, militarism, nationalism, religious intolerance, hypocrisy, phonyness, all sorts of dangerous, ready-made, artificially preserved false values. But your generation and the generation before yours went too far with their debunking job. You went overboard. Over-debunk, that's what you did. It's moral overkill. It's like those insecticides Rachel Carson speaks of in her book, that poison everything, and kill all the nice, useful bugs as well as the bad ones, and in the end poison human beings as well. In the end, it poisons life itself, the very air we breathe. That's what you did, morally and intellectually speaking. Yours is a silent spring. You have overprotected yourselves. You are all no more than twenty, twenty-two years old, but yours is a silent spring, I'm telling you. Nothing sings for you any more. ~ Romain Gary

Reality is not an inspiration for literature. At its best, literature is an inspiration for reality. ~ Romain Gary

...all intolerable local situations have become world situations, with the result that the whole world has become a local situation, here, under your nose, staring at you, and when your sensitivity is still alive and not dulled, that is, when you are young, if all you can do is stare back at it helplessly, you run amok, you blow up, you smash whatever is at hand, you express yourself, you seek a release. ~ Romain Gary

The only possible answers are questions. Real Vikings are questions. The answers are what the Vikings chanted during the voyage to keep their spirits up. ~ Romain Gary

I am weak, I say with no presumptions. I have no merit, I note it, that is all. There are times that I feel so weak there most be a mistake, and as I don't know what I mean with this, I am not going to say anything else ~ Romain Gary

Bruno, someday you will die of kindness, tolerance and gentleness. Well, given the options, it isn't a bad way to go. ~ Romain Gary

Humor is a passive form of terrorism, of resistance, and of pseudo-aggression that has less to do with changing the world than with mental hygiene. It is self-therapy... ~ Romain Gary

A writer's subconscious is one of the filthiest places there are: as a matter of fact, you can find the whole world there. ~ Romain Gary

E was simply a man who had gone even further into loneliness than others - and that's a real exploit, by the way; where breaking records in loneliness is concerned, we're all champions in the field ... he continually repeats: dogs are not enough anymore. People feel so damned lonely, they need company, they need something bigger, stronger, to lean on, something that can really stand up to it all. Dogs aren't enough; what we need is elephants ... ~ Romain Gary

The diplomatic kids had a hectic sort of life, being constantly thrown from one end of the world to the other and always playing tennis, no matter who was being machine-gunned in the streets, you were always extraterritorial, history was not permitted to touch you, it was only buzzing around your tennis court in a bloody sort of way. You were so well protected that you went to pieces. Diplomatic immunity could do very strange things to you, it was like weightlessness. You had to remind yourself constantly that you actually existed, and you were not supposed to identify yourself too much with the suffering of whatever country you were posted to. But then, who needs reality anyway? ~ Romain Gary

Men sometimes die much earlier than they are burried. ~ Romain Gary

But, my dear child,' I stammered, I don't see how the desire to preserve the African fauna . . She broke in on me: 'Oh, to hell with the African fauna! Can't you see what the real question is? The question is simply whether you have confidence in yourselves, in your good sense, in your reason, in your ability to prevail, yes, to prevail. Out there in the bush is a man who believes in you, a man who believes you're capable of kindness, of generosity, of ... of a ... of a great love, in which there'd be room even for herds of elephants, and . . . and even for the most wretched dog alive! ~ Romain Gary

The only way to prove you are normal is to smash someone's face in ~ Romain Gary

Islam calls that 'the roots of heaven' and to the Mexican Indians it is the 'tree of life'
the thing that makes both of them fall on their knees and raise their eyes and beat their tormented breasts. [ ... ] Our needs
for justice, for freedom and dignity
are roots of heaven that are deeply embedded in our hearts, but of heaven itself men know nothing but the gripping roots ... ~ Romain Gary

I see History as a relay race in which one of us, before dropping in his tracks, must carry one stage further the challenge of being a man. ~ Romain Gary

All sorts of behaviour can be inspired by self-hatred. You can become an artist. Commit suicide. Adopt a new name, a new country, a new language.
All of the above (Romain Gary). ~ Nancy Huston

I don't consider myself to be definite, but in waiting position and eventual appearance ~ Romain Gary

You are the only man I ever respected,' she said. 'But you haven't aged well. You have stayed young. Men who stay young don't age well. ~ 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. ~ Romain Gary

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. ~ Romain Gary

The avantgarde are people who don't exactly know where they want to go, but are the first to get there. ~ Romain Gary

With maternal love, life makes a promise at dawn that it can never hold. You are forced to eat cold food until your days end. After that, each time a woman holds you in her arms and against her chest, these are merely condolences. You always come back to yell at your mother's grave like an abandoned dog. Never again, never again, never again. ~ Romain Gary

-Would you wish us to invest it for you?
-No, I would like you to set up a trust for dumb animals.
-What kind of dumb animals do you have in mind, Miss Donahue?
-Oh, stray dogs. Rats. Birds.
-We could still invest it for you. Then the animals would get the income without touching the capital.
-No, I don't wish to invest it. I don't want them to get rich. They might become human. ~ Romain Gary

When a war is won, it's the losers, not the winners, who are liberated. ~ Romain Gary

What makes a good client, to me, is one that signed on for the strategy as well as the execution, not just the end product. ~ Gary Vaynerchuk

On Career Day in high school, you don't walk around looking for the cartoon guy. ~ Gary Larson

He couldn't stop the grin that spread across his face. Who knew Miss California would be good in a bar fight. ~ Codi Gary

Love does more than bring peace where there is conflict. It brings a different way of being in the world. ~ Gary Zukav

Both teams are making mistakes. Florida's making these itsy-bitsy little ones, and Tennessee is making huge, gigantic mistakes. ~ Gary Danielson

…Sugar has become an ingredient avoidable in prepared and packaged foods only by concerted and determined effort, effectively ubiquitous. Not just in the obvious sweet foods (candy bars, cookies, ice creams, chocolates, sodas, juices, sports and energy drinks, sweetened iced tea, jams, jellies, and breakfast cereals both cold and hot), but also in peanut butter, salad dressings, ketchup, BBQ sauces, canned soups, cold cuts, luncheon meats, bacon, hot dogs, pretzels, chips, roasted peanuts, spaghetti sauces, canned tomatoes, and breads. From the 1980's onward manufacturers of products advertised as uniquely healthy because they were low in fat…not to mention gluten free, no MSG, and zero grams trans fat per serving, took to replacing those fat calories with sugar to make them equally…palatable and often disguising the sugar under one or more of the fifty plus names, by which the fructose-glucose combination of sugar and high-fructose corn syrup might be found. Fat was removed from candy bars sugar added, or at least kept, so that they became health food bars. Fat was removed from yogurts and sugars added and these became heart healthy snacks, breakfasts, and lunches. ~ Gary Taubes

Fall in love with me, Gary! She thought. Please. Please sit here holding me and think there's nowhere on earth I'd rather be than here, and no girl I'd rather have in my lap than Beth Rose Chapman! ~ Caroline B. Cooney

Most men are essentially dead by thirty. ~ Romain Rolland

This is the universal property of the human mind. Abstract rules form the core of everything from computer programs to grammars. Our results show that babies' minds are built to look for such rules - even without being told. ~ Gary Marcus

Wherever I go for the military, they always call me Lt. Dan. They just can't help it. ~ Gary Sinise

I grew up with Apocalypse Now and Badlands, so I had a real awe thing going. ~ Gary Cole

He had to keep thinking of them because if he forgot them and did not think of them they might forget about him. And he had to keep hoping. ~ Gary Paulsen

There's no in between-you're either good or bad. We were in between. ~ Gary Lineker

As part of an effort to prod college seniors to get tetanus shots, a group of students was given a lecture meant to educate them about the dangers of tetanus and the importance of getting inoculated against it. A large majority of those students reported that they were convinced and planned to get their shots, but in the end only 3 percent got them. Bu another group of students, who were presented with the same lecture, had a 28 percent inoculation rate. The difference? The second group was given a map of the campus and asked to plan their route to the health center and pick a date and time to go. Sometimes, you see, motivation isn't our problem. Rather, we need to identify life's everyday mental obstacles - regret, fatigue, overconfidence, fear, to name just four - and put ourselves into position to hurdle them. ~ Gary Belsky

It's very logical: There is proven ROI in doing whatever you can to turn your customers into advocates for your brand or business. The way to create advocates is to offer superior customer service. ~ Gary Vaynerchuk

People are chasing cash, not happiness. When you chase money, you're going to lose. You're just going to. Even if you get the money, you're not going to be happy. ~ Gary Vaynerchuk

If customer ignorance is a profit centre for you, you're in trouble. ~ Gary Hamel

...Newspapers, popular fiction, and magazines churned out words by the million, and the worn coins of everyday speech were less and less able to communicate anything more than the most commonplace meanings.... ~ Lachman Gary Larkin Steve

You run into people who want to write poetry who don't want to read anything in the tradition. That's like wanting to be a builder but not finding out what different kinds of wood you use. ~ Gary Snyder

I love going to concerts, so that whole environment is something that intrigues me anyway. ~ Gary Cole

If in doubt, write it out! ~ Gary M. Nelson

Hide my head I want to drown my sorrow / No tomorrow, no tomorrow. ~ Gary Jules

Learn everything you can - everything. And then use all that you have learned to grow up too be a wise and good man. ~ Gary D. Schmidt

Camp out in the living room. Spread your blankets and pillows on the floor. Get your Pepsi and popcorn. Pretend the TV is broken and talk like you used to when you were dating. Talk till the sun comes up or something else happens. If the floor gets too hard, go back upstairs and go to bed. You won't forget this evening! ~ Gary Chapman

He has been known by many names: Lucifer, Beelzabub, Belial, the Prince of Lies, Satan, and at a party once an obnoxious drunk kept calling him "Dude." ~ Gary Larson

The development of social media, citizen journalism, and new technology has made it more difficult for the established media to simply ignore gun deaths in certain areas. ~ Gary Younge

The thought of going on tour with people like Toyah Wilcox is just appalling. I'm certainly not tempted. ~ Gary Kemp

Your religious beliefs typically depend on the community in which you were raised or live. The spiritual experiences of people in ancient Greece, medieval Japan or 21st-century Saudi Arabia do not lead to belief in Christianity. It seems, therefore, that religious belief very likely tracks not truth but social conditioning." - Gary Gutting, "The Stone," New York Times, September 14, 2011 ~ Peter Boghossian

Perfectionism is a perpetual flight into an illusory future that cannot be attained. ~ Gary Zukav

This business of friendship was a curious thing, almost as difficult to learn as the busuness of acting. Sometimes you were expected to tell the truth, to express your thoughts and your feelings, and then other times what was wanted was a lie, a bit of disguise. ~ Gary L. Blackwood

I found that options traders - the Amex was mainly an options exchange - routinely conspired to keep as wide as possible the spreads between the prices investors paid and the prices floor traders paid for the same securities. ~ Gary Weiss

Come,we cannot leave the poor man pacing the swamp.He will think we are engaging in something other than conversation."
Wickedly Savannah moved her body against his,her hands sliding provocatively, enticingly, over the rigid thickness straining his trousers. "Aren't we?" she asked with that infuriating sexy smile he could never resist.
"We have a lot of clean-up to do here, Savannah," he said severely. "And we need to get word to our people, spread the society's list through our ranks, warn those in danger."
Her fingers were working at the buttons of his shirt so that she could push the material aside to examin his chest and shoulder,where two of the worst wounds had been.She had to see his body for herself, touch him to assure herself he was completely healed. "I suggest, for now,that your biggest job is to create something for Gary to do so we can have a little privacy. ~ Christine Feehan

There is no one more capable of helping you than yourself. ~ Gary Hopkins

I don't think anyone who has been to Africa comes away untouched by the place. You see a lot of beauty and optimism, but you also come away with an awareness of the huge gulf between what most of us have and what most of them have to make do with. Then, every now and then, a famine or a war makes everything a hundred times worse. ~ Gary Frank

I think I am disciplined when I need to be, and relax when I can. ~ Romain Grosjean

Bill Clinton was friendly and charming with just about everyone besides Hillary. He always seemed to want to give his company extra time. He was very generous that way. Like him or not, share his political ideas or not, find yourself in the same room with him, and you are hooked. You can't help but like him. But that was not Hillary. She was clearly all business, 24/7. Her private leadership style was based on pure fear and loathing - and I never saw her that turn off. Even in the president's presence, Mrs. Clinton operated at far greater than arm's length - a cheerless grifter always on her scheming way to someone or something else more important than the person directly in front of her. ~ Gary J. Byrne

Hot oil! We need hot oil! ... Forget the water balloons! ~ Gary Larson

When a workplace becomes toxic, its poison spreads beyond its walls and into the lives of its workers and their families. ~ Gary Chapman

I suppose longevity requires giving up life's pleasures, one by one, until there's nothing left. ~ Gary Inbinder

The problem of forgetting might not torment us so much if we could only convince ourselves that remembering isn't important. Perhaps the things we learn - words, dates, formulas, historical and biographical details - don't really matter. Facts can be looked up. That's what the Internet is for. ~ Gary Wolf

God is in charge, waiting for His people to challenge the rulers of the earth and take the steering wheel from them, ... the battle for the earth is currently going on. ~ Gary North

Dear friend, you are being faithful to God when you care for the traveling teachers who pass through, even though they are strangers to you. - 3 John 1:5 ~ Gary Chapman

Doug Swieteck's brother wouldn't even come near me, and I would foil Mrs. Baker's nefarious plan. But ~ Gary D. Schmidt

We always looked forward to playing Aston Villa to hear him mangle Ugo Ehiogu's name. "Make sure you pick up Ehugu, Ehogy, whatever his name is." ~ Gary Neville

My Grandmother standing wordless fifteen minutes Between rows of loganberries, clippers poised in her hand. ~ Gary Snyder

Doom scenarios, even though they might be true, are not politically or psychologically effective. The first step ... is to make us love the world rather than to make us fear for the end of the world. ~ Gary Snyder

Love is a choice. ~ Gary Chapman