Elias Canetti Quotes

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

“A person often falls very ill in order to become someone else and then returns to health much disappointed.”

“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.”

“As if one could know the good a person is capable of, when one doesn't know the bad he might do.”

“Beauty always has something remote.”

“Each organism raises its head over a field of corpses, smiles into the sun, and declares life good.”

“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?”

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

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

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

“He would like to start from scratch. Where is scratch?”

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

“History portrays everything as if it could not have come otherwise. History is on the side of what happened.”

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

“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.”

“In eternity everything is just beginning.”

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

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

“It is important what a man still plans at the end. It shows the measure of injustice in his death.”

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

“One has a prejudice wherever one fears a transformation.”

“One lives in the naïve notion that later there will be more room than in the entire past.”

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

“One should use praise to recognize what one is not.”

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

“People's fates are simplified by their names.”

“Pessimists are not boring. Pessimists are right. Pessimists are superfluous.”

“Speak as though it were the last sentence allowed you.”

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

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

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

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

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

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

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

“How unfair, he thought; I can close my mouth whenever I like, as tight as I like, and what has a mouth to say? It is there for taking in nourishment, yet it is well defended, but ears - ears are a prey to every onslaught.”

“Learning is the art of ignoring.”

“Understanding, as we understand it, is misunderstanding.”

“What proof have we that inorganic objects can feel no pain? Who knows if a book may not yearn for other books, its companions of many years, in some way strange to us and therefore never yet perceived?”

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

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

“A crowd exists so long as it has an unattained goal.”

“Every command leaves behind a painful sting in the person who is forced to carry it out.”

“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 is those who devote themselves to killing who have power.”

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

“Any life is laughable if one knows it well enough. It is something serious and terrible if one knows it even better.”

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

“I want to keep smashing myself until I am whole.”

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

“There are books, that one has for twenty years without reading them, that one always keeps at hand, that one takes along from city to city, from country to country, carefully packed, even when there is very little room, and perhaps one leafs through them while removing them from a trunk; yet one carefully refrains from reading even a complete sentence. Then after twenty years, there comes a moment when suddenly, as though under a high compulsion, one cannot help taking in such a book from beginning to end, at one sitting: it is like a revelation. Now one knows why one made such a fuss about it. It had to be with one for a long time; it had to travel; it had to occupy space; it had to be a burden; and now it has reached the goal of its voyage, now it reveals itself, now it illuminates the twenty bygone years it mutely lived with one. It could not say so much if it had not been there mutely the whole time, and what idiot would dare to assert that the same things had always been in it.”

“Ambition is the death of thought.”

“He is a lesser figure than X”—how it pleases an Englishman to say that! Never suspecting what basement that would put him in, a wood louse.”

“His great holy books, which he does not know. They are so holy that he does not dare to open them.”

“I hate judgments that only crush and don’t transform.”

“I love writers who limit themselves, who write beneath their intelligence.”

“I repulse death with all my strength. If I accepted it, I would be a murderer.”

“It amazes me how a person to whom literature means anything can take it up as an object of study.”

“One who obeys himself suffocates as surely as one who obeys others.”

“Relearn astonishment, stop grasping for knowledge, lose the habit of the past.”

“Say the most personal thing, say it, nothing else matters, don’t be ashamed, the generalities can be found in the newspaper.”

“The story of your youth must not turn into a catalog of what became important in your later life. It must also contain the dissipation, the failure, and the waste.”

“When he has nothing to say, he lets words speak.”

“Whenever the truth threatens, he hides behind a thought.”

“You keep taking note of whatever confirms your ideas—better to write down what refutes and weakens them!”

“You need the rhetoric of others, the aversion it inspires, in order to find the way out of your own.”

“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.”