Elias Canetti Quotes - Page 3

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

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

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

There emanates from superlatives a destructive force.

He would like to start from scratch. Where is scratch?

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

A child. . . opens and closes like a blossom.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

I want to keep smashing myself until I am whole.

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

One should use praise to recognize what one is not.

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

People's fates are simplified by their names.

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

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