Louis-Ferdinand Celine Quotes

What really flatters a man is that you think him worth flattering.

He that loves to be flattered is worthy o' the flatterer.

Mankind naturally and generally love to be flattered.

When you start to think about the drives that humans have, I think sometimes we find we are simpler than we thought and more easily manipulated.

Fear arises sooner than anything else.

We love flattery, even though we are not deceived by it, because it shows that we are of importance enough to be courted.

The love of admiration leads to fraud, much more than the love of commendation; but, on the other hand, the latter is much more likely to spoil our: good actions by the substitution of an inferior motive.

The drive for control, or the perception thereof, is truly the strongest force in human nature.

War makes monsters of men, you once said to me Todd. Well, so does too much knowledge. Too much knowledge of your fellow man, too much knowledge of his weakness, his pathetic greed and vanity, and how laughably easy it is to control him.

Tilling the fertile soil of man's vanity.

There are two kinds of people in this world: people who want to be desired, and people who want to be desired so much that they pretend they don't.

The love of praise, howe'er conceal'd by art, Reigns more or less, and glows in ev'ry heart.

Vanity is so anchored in the heart of man that a soldier, a soldier's servant, a cook, a porter brags and wishes to have his admirers. Even philosophers wish for them. Those who write against vanity want to have the glory of having written well; and those who read it desire the glory of having read it. I who write this have perhaps this desire, and perhaps those who will read it.

Flattery is all right so long as you don't inhale.

Heroes are very human, most of them; very easily touched by praise.

We are all potentially such sick men. The sanest and best of us are of one clay with lunatics and prison-inmates. And whenever we feel this, such a sense of the vanity of our voluntary career comes over us, that all our morality appears but as a plaster hiding a sore it can never cure, and all our well-doing as the hollowest substitute for that well-being that our lives ought to be grounded in, but alas! are not.

Egotism is more like an offense, than a crime; though it is allowable to speak of yourself, provided nothing is advanced in favor; but I cannot help suspecting that those who abuse themselves are, in reality, angling for approbation.

None can be pleased without praise, and few can be praised without falsehood.

At court one becomes a sort of human ant eater, and learns to catch one's prey by one's tongue.

Our credulity is greatest concerning the things we know least about. And since we know least about ourselves, we are ready to believe all that is said about us. Hence the mysterious power of both flattery and calumny.

Mountains of gold would not seduce some men, yet flattery would break them down.

One will rarely err if extreme actions be ascribed to vanity, ordinary actions to habit, and mean actions to fear.

I wonder if the course of narcissism through the ages would have been any different had Narcissus first peered into a cesspool. He probably did.

Never permit yourself to indulge in cheap flattery, which often times means to merely satisfy the individuals vanity and sometimes to ingratiate the flatter into the good graces of the flattered.

Considering the way evolution works, it should not be surprising if every man has got a Don Giovanni somewhere inside him.