Top 83 Elias Canetti Quotes
#1. 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
#2. Understanding, as we understand it, is misunderstanding.
Elias Canetti
#3. There can be no Creator, simply because his grief at the fate of his creation would be inconceivable and unendurable.
Elias Canetti
#4. 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
#5. His head is made of stars, but not yet arranged into constellations.
Elias Canetti
#6. Words are not too old, only people are too old if they use the same words too frequently.
Elias Canetti
#7. 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
#8. It is important to say all the great thoughts again, without knowing that they have already been said.
Elias Canetti
#10. 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
#11. She was crude, but loyal. He began to understand her even better than before. A pity she was so old; it was too late to try to make a human being of her.
Elias Canetti
#12. 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
#13. In five minutes the earth would be a desert, and you cling to books.
Elias Canetti
#14. History portrays everything as if it could not have come otherwise. History is on the side of what happened.
Elias Canetti
#15. Her somewhat overly round head was wedged deep within her shoulders on a short body; it sat right upon it, as though there had never been such a thing as a neck, what a superfluous contraption.
Elias Canetti
#16. 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
#17. There is something fluid about [packs] during the course of any individual manifestation. [p. 127]
Elias Canetti
#18. 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
#19. Whether or not God is dead: it is impossible to keep silent about him who was there for so long.
Elias Canetti
#20. The first effect of adjusting to other people is that one becomes boring.
Elias Canetti
#21. At this point, the jealousy that tortured me all my life commenced, and the force with which it came over me marked me forever. It became my true passion, utterly heedless of any attempts at convincing me or pointing out a better way.
Elias Canetti
#22. Whenever you observe an animal closely, you feel as if a human being sitting inside were making fun of you.
Elias Canetti
#23. Seizing and incorporating ... There is nothing about us which is more strongly primitive. [p. 203]
Elias Canetti
#24. As if one could know the good a person is capable of, when one doesn't know the bad he might do.
Elias Canetti
#25. Every class has pupils who mimic the teachers particularly well and perform for their classmates; a class without such teacher-mimics would have something lifeless about it.
Elias Canetti
#26. Success listens only to applause. To all else it is deaf.
Elias Canetti
#27. Death is a scandal. The machine is functioning, we are all hostages
Elias Canetti
#28. People love as self-recognition what they hate as an accusation.
Elias Canetti
#29. All things one has forgotten scream for help in dreams.
Elias Canetti
#30. One should not confuse the craving for life with endorsement of it.
Elias Canetti
#31. Pessimists are not boring. Pessimists are right. Pessimists are superfluous.
Elias Canetti
#32. Someone who always has to lie discovers that every one of his lies is true.
Elias Canetti
#33. The great writers of aphorisms read as if they had all known each other well.
Elias Canetti
#34. Fear thrives strongest; there is no telling how little we would be without having suffered fear. An intrinsic characteristic of humanity is the tendency to give in to fear. No fear is lost, but its hiding places are a riddle. Perhaps, of all things, fear is the one that changes least.
Elias Canetti
#35. Since the death of his daughter, a consumptive, he had not thrashed a woman; he lived alone.
Elias Canetti
#36. The process of writing has something infinite about it. Even though it is interrupted each night, it is one single notation, and it seems most true when it eschews artistic devices of any sort.
Elias Canetti
#37. Success is the space one occupies in the newspaper. Success is one day's insolence.
Elias Canetti
#38. The act of naming is the great and solemn consolation of mankind
Elias Canetti
#39. Savor powerlessness, after power, in every phase that matches it precisely; replace every old triumph with the new defeat; strengthen yourself on your weakness; win yourself back when so very lost.
Elias Canetti
#40. One should use praise to recognize what one is not.
Elias Canetti
#41. 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
#42. When you write down your life, every page should contain something no one has ever heard about.
Elias Canetti
#43. The business friend did not recognize the sewerman, which was not surprising as the man's face was no more than a shining turd.
Elias Canetti
#45. You have but to know an object by its proper name for it to lose its dangerous magic.
Elias Canetti
#46. Justice requires that everyone should have enough to eat. But it also requires that everyone should contribute to the production of food.
Elias Canetti
#48. 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
#49. Of all of Napoleon's murders, the greatest and the most dreadful was of my father.
Elias Canetti
#50. The fluid boundary between individuals and types is a true concern of the real writer.
Elias Canetti
#51. You draw closer to truth by shutting yourself off from mankind.
Elias Canetti
#52. For I believe that part of knowledge is its desire to show itself and its refusal to put up with a merely hidden existence. I find mute knowledge dangerous, for it grows ever more mute and ultimately secret, and must then avenge itself for being secret.
Elias Canetti
#53. The hand which scoops up the water is the first vessel. The fingers of both hands intertwined are the first basket. [p. 217]
Elias Canetti
#54. 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
#55. Most religions do not make men better, only warier.
Elias Canetti
#56. 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
#59. He would like to start from scratch. Where is scratch?
Elias Canetti
#60. I try to imagine someone saying to Shakespeare, 'Relax!
Elias Canetti
#61. One needs time to free oneself of wrong convictions. If it happens too suddenly, they go on festering.
Elias Canetti
#62. He who is obsessed by death is made guilty by it.
Elias Canetti
#63. Everything one records contains a grain of hope, no matter how deeply it may come from despair.
Elias Canetti
#64. 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?
Elias Canetti
#65. In the hierarchy of man's activities, eating was the lowest. Eating had become the object of a cult, but in fact it was but the preliminary to other, utterly contemptible motions. It occurred to him that he wanted to perform one of these too.
Elias Canetti
#66. I want to keep smashing myself until I am whole.
Elias Canetti
#67. Of all the words in all languages I know, the greatest concentration is in the English word I.
Elias Canetti
#68. There emanates from superlatives a destructive force.
Elias Canetti
#70. 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
#71. There is no doubt: the study of man is just beginning, at the same time that his end is in sight.
Elias Canetti
#72. 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
#73. The self-explorer, whether he wants to or not, becomes the explorer of everything else.
Elias Canetti
#74. It is important what a man still plans at the end. It shows the measure of injustice in his death.
Elias Canetti
#75. Speak as though it were the last sentence allowed you.
Elias Canetti
#76. 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
#77. One has a prejudice wherever one fears a transformation.
Elias Canetti
#78. The remaining, less developed characters, were still either listening or laughing. They were divided between curiosity and satisfaction. They felt happy, but did not know it.
Elias Canetti
#79. A person often falls very ill in order to become someone else and then returns to health much disappointed.
Elias Canetti
#80. Rulers who want to unleash war know very well that they must procure or invent a first victim.
Elias Canetti
#81. It doesn't matter how new an idea is: what matters is how new it becomes.
Elias Canetti
#82. How unfair, he thought; I can close my mouth whenever I like, as tight as I like, and what has a mouth to say? It is there for taking in nourishment, yet it is well defended, but ears - ears are a prey to every onslaught.
Elias Canetti
#83. A head full of stars, just not in constellation yet.
Elias Canetti
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