Elias Canetti Quotes - Page 2

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

One has a prejudice wherever one fears a transformation.

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

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

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

Beauty always has something remote.

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.

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

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.

...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?

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

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

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

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

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.

Most religions do not make men better, only warier.

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.

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.