Eugene Ionesco Quotes

Banality is a symptom of non-communication. Men hide behind their cliches.

It is not the answer that enlightens, but the question.

No society has been able to abolish human sadness, no political system can deliver us from the pain of living, from our fear of death, our thirst for the absolute. It is the human condition that directs the social condition, not vice versa.

Like all revolutions, the surrealist revolution was a reversion, a restitution, an expression of vital and indispensable spiritual needs.

The supreme trick of mass insanity is that it persuades you that the only abnormal person is the one who refuses to join in the madness of others, the one who tries vainly to resist. We will never understand totalitarianism if we do not understand that people rarely have the strength to be uncommon.

An avant-garde man is like an enemy inside a city he is bent on destroying, against which he rebels; for like any system of government, an established form of expression is also a form of oppression. The avant-garde man is the opponent of an existing system.

If one does not understand the usefulness of the useless and the uselessness of the useful, one cannot understand art.

Theatre is simply what cannot be expressed by any other means; a complexity of words, movements, gestures that convey a vision of the world inexpressible in any other way.

Ideologies separate us. Dreams and anguish bring us together.

Realism falls short of reality. It shrinks it, attenuates it, falsifies it; it does not take into account our basic truths and our fundamental obsessions: love, death, astonishment. It presents man in a reduced and estranged perspective. Truth is in our dreams, in the imagination.

In the name of religion, one tortures, persecutes, builds pyres. In the guise of ideologies, one massacres, tortures and kills. In the name of justice one punishes...in the name of love of one's country or of one's race hates other countries, despises them, massacres them. In the name of equality and brotherhood there is suppression and torture. There is nothing in common between the means and the end, the means go far beyond the end...ideologies and religion... are the alibis of the means.

Childhood is the world of miracle and wonder; as if creation rose, bathed in the light, out of the darkness, utterly new and fresh and astonishing. The end of childhood is when things cease to astonish us.

All cats die. Socrates is dead. Therefore Socrates is a cat.

A writer never has a vacation. For a writer, life consists of either writing or thinking about writing.

It's only when I say that everything is incomprehensible that I come as close as possible to understanding the only thing it is given to us to understand.

The Arts are man's most useless ... and essential ... activity.

I have no other pictures of the world apart from those which express evanescence, and callousness, vanity and anger, emptiness, orhideous useless hate. Everything has merely confirmed what I had seen and understood in my childhood: futile and sordid fits of rage, cries suddenly blanketed by the silence, shadows swallowed up for ever by the night.

There are more dead people than living. And their numbers are increasing. The living are getting rarer.

There is no religion in which everyday life is not considered a prison; there is no philosophy or ideology that does not think that we live in alienation.

To become conscious of what is horrifying and to laugh at it is to become master of that which is horrifying

Why do people always expect authors to answer questions? I am an author because I want to ask questions. If I had answers, I'd be a politician.

I personally would like to bring a tortoise onto the stage, turn it into a racehorse, then into a hat, a song, a dragoon and a fountain of water. One can dare anything in the theatre and it is the place where one dares the least.

Many people have delusions of grandeur but you're deluded by triviality.

God is dead. Marx is dead. And I don't feel so well myself.

It isn't what people think that is important, but the reason they think what they think.

Oh words, what crimes are committed in your name? ~Jack or The Submission

I believe that in the history of art and of thought there has always been at every living moment of culture a will to renewal. This is not the prerogative of the last decade only. All history is nothing but a succession of crises - of rupture, repudiation and resistance. When there is no crisis, there is stagnation, petrifaction and death. All thought, all art is aggressive.

People who don't read are brutes. It is better to write than to make war, isn't it?

The end of childhood is when things cease to astonish us. When the world seems familiar, when one has got used to existence, one has become an adult.

You can only predict things after they have happened.

The universe seems to me infinitely strange and foreign. At such a moment I gaze upon it with a mixture of anguish and euphoria; separate from the universe, as though placed at a certain distance outside it; I look and I see pictures, creatures that move in a kind of timeless time and spaceless space, emitting sounds that are a kind of language I no longer understand or ever register.

Only the ephemeral is of lasting value.

DAISY: I never knew you were such a realist-I thought you were more poetic. Where's your imagination? There are many sides to reality. Choose the one that's best for you. Escape into the world of imagination.

A person who has not completely lost the memory of paradise, even though it is a faint one, will suffer endlessly. He will feel the call of the essential world, will hear the voice that comes from so far away that one cannot find out where it comes from, a voice that cannot guide him.

That's how we stay young these days: murder and suicide.

A work of art is above all an adventure of the mind.

I started writing for the theatre because I hated it.

Beauty is a precious trace that eternity causes to appear to us and that it takes away from us. A manifestation of eternity, and a sign of death as well.

You've always made the mistake of being yourself.

We are all looking for something of extraordinary importance whose nature we have forgotten; I am writing the memoirs of a man who has lost his memory.

Boredom flourishes too, when you feel safe. It's a symptom of security.

Explanation separates us from astonishment, which is the only gateway to the incomprehensible.

The brightest light, the light of Italy, the purest sky of Scandinavia in the month of June is only a half-light when one compares it to the light of childhood. Even the nights were blue.

Childhood is over the moment things are no longer astonishing.

The critic should describe, and not prescribe.

We have not the time to take our time.

Everything that has been will be, everything that will be is, everything that will be has been.

Language should almost break up or explode in its fruitless effort to contain so many meanings.

Shakespeare was the great one before us. His place was between God and despair.

We haven't the time to take out time.