Elias Canetti famous quotes

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

#Fun #Animal #Sitting

All the things one has forgotten scream for help in dreams.
-- Elias Canetti

#Inspirational #Dream #Helping

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.
-- Elias Canetti

#Dying #Earth #Ugly

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?
-- Elias Canetti

#Eye #People #Decision

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

#Stars #Made #Constellations

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

#Writing #Night #Infinite

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

#Men #Sight #Doubt

When you write down your life, every page should contain something no one has ever heard about
-- Elias Canetti

#Writing #Pages #Should

There is nothing that man fears more than the touch of the unknown.
-- Elias Canetti

#Men

Every decision is liberating, even if it leads to disaster.
-- Elias Canetti

#Decision #Disaster #Liberating

One has a prejudice wherever one fears a transformation.
-- Elias Canetti

#Fear #Prejudice #Transformation

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.
-- Elias Canetti

#Home #Heartless #Looks

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

#Justice #Literature #Enough

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.
-- Elias Canetti

#Men #Want #Able

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.
-- Elias Canetti

#Happiness #Hate #People

Justice begins with the recognition of the necessity of sharing. The oldest law is that which regulates it, and this is still themost important law today and, as such, has remained the basic concern of all movements which have at heart the community of human activities and of human existence in general.
-- Elias Canetti

#Heart #Justice #Community

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

#Death #Men #Important

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

#War #Want #Firsts

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.
-- Elias Canetti

#Acceptance #Self #Finals

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

#Atheist #Grief #Fate

Almost Kien was tempted to believe in happiness, that contemptible life-goal of illiterates. If it came of itself, without being hunted for, if you did not hold it fast by force and treated it with a certain condescension, it was permissible to endure its presence for a few days
-- Elias Canetti

#Believe #Goal #Force

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

#Machines #Scandal #Hostage

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.
-- Elias Canetti

#Darkness #Unexpected #Crime

...how could I, fool that I am, go on sitting in my office, or here at home, instead of leaping onto a train with my eyes shut and opening them only when I am with you?
-- Elias Canetti

#Home #Eye #Office

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

#Stars #Constellations

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.
-- Elias Canetti

#Thinking #Enemy #Firsts

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.
-- Elias Canetti

#Children #Parenting #Practice

I cannot become modest; too many things burn in me; the old solutions are falling apart; nothing has been done yet with the new ones. So I begin, everywhere at once, as if I had a century ahead of me.
-- Elias Canetti

#Fall #Done #Century

Learning is the art of ignoring.
-- Elias Canetti

#Art #Learning

Slumbering in every human being lies an infinity of possibilities, which one must not arouse in vain. For it is terrible when the whole man resonates with echoes and echoes, none becoming a real voice.
-- Elias Canetti

#Real #Lying #Men

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

#Mankind #Draws

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

#Inspirational #Aphorism #Wells

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

#Success #Space #One Day

Pessimists are not boring. Pessimists are right. Pessimists are superfluous.
-- Elias Canetti

#Fear #Boring #Pessimist

I want to keep smashing myself until I am whole.
-- Elias Canetti

#Want #Smashing

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

#Self #Want #Explorers

I try to imagine someone saying to Shakespeare, 'Relax!
-- Elias Canetti

#Trying #Relax #Energy

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

#People #Boredom #Adjusting

Beauty always has something remote.
-- Elias Canetti

#Beauty

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

#History #Sides

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

#People #Use

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

#Knowing #Important #Said

The paranoiac is the exact image of the ruler. The only difference is their position in the world. One might even think the paranoiac the more impressive of the two because he is sufficient unto himself and cannot be shaken by failure.
-- Elias Canetti

#Thinking #Two #Differences

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

#Language #Concentration

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

#Creativity #Ideas #What Matters

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

#Hate #Self #People

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

#God #Long #Impossible

He who is obsessed by death is made guilty by it.
-- Elias Canetti

#Death #Guilty #Obsessed

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

#Philosophical #Despair #Matter

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

#Might #Capability #Persons

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.
-- Elias Canetti

#Men #Add #Lice

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

#Life #Should #Endorsements

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

#Book #Reading #Would Be

The act of naming is the great and solemn consolation of mankind
-- Elias Canetti

#Mankind #Consolation #Solemn

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

#Mad #Effort #Survival

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

#Names #Magic #Statistics

He would like to start from scratch. Where is scratch?
-- Elias Canetti

#Scratches #Statistics

People's fates are simplified by their names
-- Elias Canetti

#Fate #Names #People

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 the hand.
-- Elias Canetti

#Hands #Order #Philosopher

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

#Deaf #Applause

Someone who always has to lie discovers that every one of his lies is true
-- Elias Canetti

#Lying

It is only in a crowd that man can become free of this fear of being touched. That is the only situation in which the fear changes into its opposite… The reversal of fear of being touched belongs to the nature of crowds. The feeling of relief is most striking where the density of the crowd is greatest
-- Elias Canetti

#Men #Opposites #Feelings

There emanates from superlatives a destructive force.
-- Elias Canetti

#Force #Superlatives

One should use praise to recognize what one is not.
-- Elias Canetti

#Use #Praise #Should

Most religions do not make men better, only warier.
-- Elias Canetti

#Men

Understanding, as we understand it, is misunderstanding.
-- Elias Canetti

#Understanding #Misunderstanding