Elias Canetti Quotes

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

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

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

People's fates are simplified by their names.

One should use praise to recognize what one is not.

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

Most religions do not make men better, only warier.

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

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?

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.