Elias Canetti quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Elias Canetti

Elias Canetti Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Elias Canetti on Wise Famous Quotes.

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

Seizing and incorporating ... There is nothing about us which is more strongly primitive. [p. 203]

People's fates are simplified by their names.

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

The fluid boundary between individuals and types is a true concern of the real writer.

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

The business friend did not recognize the sewerman, which was not surprising as the man's face was no more than a shining turd.

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

One should use praise to recognize what one is not.

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

Understanding, as we understand it, is misunderstanding.

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

Whether or not God is dead: it is impossible to keep silent about him who was there for so long.

Beauty always has something remote.

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

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

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

In eternity everything is just beginning.

The self-explorer, whether he wants to or not, becomes the explorer of everything else.

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.

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

Every decision is liberating, even if it leads to disaster. Otherwise, why do so many people walk upright and with open arms into their misfortune?

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

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

Most religions do not make men better, only warier.

There can be no Creator, simply because his grief at the fate of his creation would be inconceivable and unendurable.

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

All things one has forgotten scream for help in dreams.

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

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

There emanates from superlatives a destructive force.

Death is a scandal. The machine is functioning, we are all hostages

There is something fluid about [packs] during the course of any individual manifestation. [p. 127]

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.

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

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

Since the death of his daughter, a consumptive, he had not thrashed a woman; he lived alone.

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

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

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

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

I want to keep smashing myself until I am whole.

The hand which scoops up the water is the first vessel. The fingers of both hands intertwined are the first basket. [p. 217]

One needs time to free oneself of wrong convictions. If it happens too suddenly, they go on festering.

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

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

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

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

Of all of Napoleon's murders, the greatest and the most dreadful was of my father.

In five minutes the earth would be a desert, and you cling to books.

One has a prejudice wherever one fears a transformation.

A head full of stars, just not in constellation yet.

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

Learning is the art of ignoring.

Relearn astonishment.

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

Speak as though it were the last sentence allowed you.

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

Someone who always has to lie discovers that every one of his lies is true.