Elias Canetti Quotes
A Bulgarian-born novelist and non-fiction writer of Sephardi Jewish ancestry who wrote in German. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1981.
(1905 - 1994)
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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 limb of time like lice.
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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.
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All the things one has forgotten scream for help in dreams.
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As if one could know the good a person is capable of, when one doesn't know the bad he might do.
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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?
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He who is obsessed by death is made guilty by it.
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His head is made of stars, but not yet arranged into constellations.
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It doesn't matter how new an idea is: what matters is how new it becomes.
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Justice requires that everyone should have enough to eat. But it also requires that everyone should contribute to the production of food.
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Most religions do not make men better, only warier.
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One should not confuse the craving for life with endorsement of it.
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One should use praise to recognize what one is not.
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People love as self-recognition what they hate as an accusation.
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People's fates are simplified by their names.
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Pessimists are not boring. Pessimists are right. Pessimists are superfluous.
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Rulers who want to unleash war know very well that they must procure or invent a first victim.
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Someone who always has to lie discovers that every one of his lies is true.
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Success is the space one occupies in the newspaper. Success is one day's insolence.
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Success listens only to applause. To all else it is deaf.
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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.
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