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?

I would like to become tolerant without overlooking anything, persecute no one even when all people persecute me; become better without noticing it; become sadder, but enjoy living; become more serene, be happy in others; belong to no one, grow in everyone; love the best, comfort the worst; not even hate myself anymore.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Learning is the art of ignoring.

Understanding, as we understand it, is misunderstanding.

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 self- explorer, whether he wants to or not, becomes the explorer of everything else. He learns to see himself, but suddenly, provided he was honest, all the rest appears, and it is as rich as he was, and, as a final crowning, richer.

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.

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

The paranoiac is the exact image of the ruler. The only difference is their position in the world. One might even think the paranoiac the more impressive of the two because he is sufficient unto himself and cannot be shaken by failure.

There is nothing that man fears more than the touch of the unknown. He wants to see what is reaching towards him, and to be able to recognize or at least classify it. Man always tends to avoid physical contact with anything strange.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

It is always the enemy who started it, even if he was not the first to speak out, he was certainly planning it; and if he was not actually planning it, he was thinking of it; and, if he was not thinking of it, he would have thought of it.

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

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

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

Almost Kien was tempted to believe in happiness, that contemptible life-goal of illiterates. If it came of itself, without being hunted for, if you did not hold it fast by force and treated it with a certain condescension, it was permissible to endure its presence for a few days

...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?