Elias Canetti Quotes

70 quotes in 758 categories

• All the things one has forgotten scream for help in dreams.
• 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…
• 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…
• His head is made of stars, but not yet arranged into constellations.
• Justice requires that everyone should have enough to eat. But it also requires that everyone should contribute to the production of food.
• 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?
• There can be no Creator, simply because his grief at the fate of his creation would be inconceivable and unendurable.
• Rulers who want to unleash war know very well that they must procure or invent a first victim.
• In five minutes the earth would be a desert, and you cling to books.
• One should not confuse the craving for life with endorsement of it.
• 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…
• 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…
• 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…
• As if one could know the good a person is capable of, when one doesn't know the bad he might do.
• Everything one records contains a grain of hope, no matter how deeply it may come from despair.
• 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…
• He who is obsessed by death is made guilty by it.
• Whether or not God is dead: it is impossible to keep silent about him who was there for so long.
• The planet's survival has become so uncertain that any effort, any thought that presupposes an assured future amounts to a mad gamble.
• You have but to know an object by its proper name for it to lose its dangerous magic.

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