Eugene Ionesco Quotes

83 quotes in 971 categories

• It isn't what people think that is important, but the reason they think what they think
• Only the ephemeral is of lasting value.
• 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…
• Every message of despair is the statement of a situation from which everybody must freely try to find a way out.
• You've always made the mistake of being yourself.
• When silence confronts us, the question to which there is no answer rings out in the silence. That ultimate "why," that great "why" is like…
• As soon as one knows one is going to die, childhood is over.... So one can be grown up at seven. Then, I believe most…
• 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…
• It's when I am fully conscious that I ask questions.
• Since the death instinct exists in the heart of everything that lives, since we suffer from trying to repress it, since everything that lives longs…
• Boredom flourishes too, when you feel safe. It's a symptom of security.
• The Arts are man's most useless ... and essential ... activity.
• Why was I born, if it wasn't forever?
• Mediocrity is more dangerous in a critic than in a writer.
• Childhood is the world of miracle and wonder; as if creation rose, bathed...
• 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.…
• There is nothing truer than myth: history, in its attempt to realize myth, distorts it, stops halfway; when history claims to have succeeded, this is…
• The light of memory, or rather the light that memory lends to things, is the palest light of all. I am not quite sure whether…
• Describe a circle, stroke its back and it turns vicious.
• I have always considered imaginative truth to be more profound, more loaded with significance, than every day reality... Everything we dream about, and by that…

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