Best 68 quotes of Elias Canetti on MyQuotes

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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?

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

Learning is the art of ignoring.

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

One has a prejudice wherever one fears a transformation.

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

One should use praise to recognize what one is not.

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

People's fates are simplified by their names.

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

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

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.

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

Speak as though it were the last sentence allowed you.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

There emanates from superlatives a destructive force.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

Understanding, as we understand it, is misunderstanding.