Cendrars Quotes & Sayings

Contrasts
The windows of my poetry are wide open on the boulevards and in the shop windows
Shine
The precious stones of light
Listen to the violins of the limousines and the xylophones of the linotypes
The sketcher washes with the hand-towel of the sky
All is color spots
And the hats of the women passing by are comets in the conflagration of the evening
Unity
There's no more unity
All the clocks now read midnight after being set back ten minutes
There's no more time.
There's no more money.
In the Chamber
They are spoiling the marvelous elements of raw material
("Contrasts") — Blaise Cendrars

The guillotine is the masterpiece of the plastic arts
Its click
Creates perpetual motion
("The Head") — Blaise Cendrars

The only word in the Martian language is written phonetically:
Kay-ray-kh-kuh-ko-kex.
It means whatever you want it to mean. — Blaise Cendrars

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

Photogenic is a stupid, nonsensical word, but it is also a great mystery. — Blaise Cendrars

Humanity lives in its fiction. — Blaise Cendrars

Do not forget that when the heart petrifies there is no progress. All science must be like a fruit, so ordered that it may hang from a tree of the flesh & ripen in the sunlight of passion. Histology, photography, electric bells, telescopes, birds, amperes, smoothing irons, etc. -this is only good for bouncing off the arse of humanity. — Blaise Cendrars

Now, the drug is taboo. You do not fool around with it. You give yourself to it and you are caught. I have a horror of it. I have lived in China without ever being curious enough to put a pipe to my lips. It is not a question of virtue. I do not like pharmacopoeia. I like lucidity. It is my guiding star. I will have nothing to do with the vertigo of opium which, with the single exception of De Quincey, is no friend to poetry. It is a filthy poison. — Blaise Cendrars

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

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

Life The machine The human soul A 75mm breech My portrait — Blaise Cendrars

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

If one wants to live one is better to incline towards imbecility than intelligence, and live only in the absurd. Intelligence consists of eating stars and turning them into dung. And the universe, at the most optimistic estimate, is nothing but God's digestive system. — Blaise Cendrars

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

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 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

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

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

The single fact of existing is already a true happiness. — Blaise Cendrars

But me no buts, we're going to make whoopee, I tell you. — Blaise Cendrars

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

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

You make me laugh, with your metaphysical anguish, its just that you're scared silly, frightened of life, of men of action, of action itself, of lack of order. But everything is disorder, dear boy. Vegetable, mineral and animal, all
disorder, and so is the multitude of human races, the life of man, thought,
history, wars, inventions, business and the arts, and all theories, passions
and systems. Its always been that way. Why are you trying to make something out
of it? And what will you make? 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

Modern man has a need for simplification that tends to find its expression one way or another. And this artificial monotony which he takes pains to create, this monotony which is slowly taking over the world, this monotony is the sign of our greatness. It bears the mark of a certain will-power, the will to utility; it is the expression of utility, a law that governs all our modern activity: the Law of Utility. — Blaise Cendrars

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