Elias Canetti Quotes

The great writers of aphorisms read as if they had all known each other well.

People love as self-recognition what they hate as an accusation.

Whenever you observe an animal closely, you feel as if a human being sitting inside were making fun of you.

All the things one has forgotten scream for help in dreams.

There is no such thing as an ugly language. Today I hear every language as if it were the only one, and when I hear of one that is dying, it overwhelms me as though it were the death of the earth.

Every decision is liberating, even if it leads to disaster. Otherwise, why do so many people walk upright and with open eyes into their misfortune?

His head is made of stars, but not yet arranged into constellations.

The process of writing has something infinite about it. Even though it is interrupted each night, it is one single notation.

When you write down your life, every page should contain something no one has ever heard about

There is nothing that man fears more than the touch of the unknown.

Explain nothing. Put it there. Say it. Leave.

A head full of stars, just not in constellation yet.

Of all the words in all languages I know, the greatest concentration is in the English word I.

It is important to say all the great thoughts again, without knowing that they have already been said.

Speak as though it were the last sentence allowed you.

Every decision is liberating, even if it leads to disaster.

There is no doubt: the study of man is just beginning, at the same time that his end is in sight

Understanding, as we understand it, is misunderstanding.

Learning is the art of ignoring.

Adults find pleasure in deceiving a child. They consider it necessary, but they also enjoy it. The children very quickly figure it out and then practice deception themselves.

Success listens only to applause. To all else it is deaf

The first effect of adjusting to other people is that one becomes boring.

Beauty always has something remote.

People's fates are simplified by their names.

A 'modern' man has nothing to add to modernism, if only because he has nothing to oppose it with. The well-adapted drop off the dead limb of time like lice.

The act of naming is the great and solemn consolation of mankind

Justice requires that everyone should have enough to eat. But it also requires that everyone should contribute to the production of food.

The self-explorer, whether he wants to or not, becomes the explorer of everything else.

Success is the space one occupies in the newspaper. Success is one day's insolence.

Most religions do not make men better, only warier.

Travelling, one accepts everything; indignation stays at home. One looks, one listens, one is roused to enthusiasm by the most dreadful things because they are new. Good travellers are heartless.

One has a prejudice wherever one fears a transformation.

The profoundest thoughts of the philosophers have something trickle about them. A lot disappears in order for something to suddenly appear in the palm of the hand.

The fear of burglars is not only the fear of being robbed, but also the fear of a sudden and unexpected clutch out of the darkness.

I try to imagine someone saying to Shakespeare, 'Relax!

Pessimists are not boring. Pessimists are right. Pessimists are superfluous.

You have but to know an object by its proper name for it to lose its dangerous magic.

A child. . . opens and closes like a blossom.

There can be no Creator, simply because his grief at the fate of his creation would be inconceivable and unendurable.

One should not confuse the craving for life with endorsement of it.

The planet's survival has become so uncertain that any effort, any thought that presupposes an assured future amounts to a mad gamble.

Rulers who want to unleash war know very well that they must procure or invent a first victim.

It doesn't matter how new an idea is: what matters is how new it becomes.

...how could I, fool that I am, go on sitting in my office, or here at home, instead of leaping onto a train with my eyes shut and opening them only when I am with you?

Death is a scandal. The machine is functioning, we are all hostages

He who is obsessed by death is made guilty by it.

You draw closer to truth by shutting yourself off from mankind.

Whether or not God is dead: it is impossible to keep silent about him who was there for so long.

Everything one records contains a grain of hope, no matter how deeply it may come from despair.

Words are not too old, only people are too old if they use the same words too frequently.