Eugene Ionesco Quotes

It is not the answer that enlightens, but the question.

The supreme trick of mass insanity is that it persuades you that the only abnormal person is the one who refuses to join in the madness of others, the one who tries vainly to resist. We will never understand totalitarianism if we do not understand that people rarely have the strength to be uncommon.

All cats die. Socrates is dead. Therefore Socrates is a cat.

If one does not understand the usefulness of the useless and the uselessness of the useful, one cannot understand art.

Ideologies separate us. Dreams and anguish bring us together.

It isn't what people think that is important, but the reason they think what they think.

Theatre is simply what cannot be expressed by any other means; a complexity of words, movements, gestures that convey a vision of the world inexpressible in any other way.

Childhood is the world of miracle and wonder; as if creation rose, bathed in the light, out of the darkness, utterly new and fresh and astonishing. The end of childhood is when things cease to astonish us.

In the name of religion, one tortures, persecutes, builds pyres. In the guise of ideologies, one massacres, tortures and kills. In the name of justice one punishes...in the name of love of one's country or of one's race hates other countries, despises them, massacres them. In the name of equality and brotherhood there is suppression and torture. There is nothing in common between the means and the end, the means go far beyond the end...ideologies and religion... are the alibis of the means.

I've always been suspicious of collective truths.

That's how we stay young these days: murder and suicide.

God is dead. Marx is dead. And I don't feel so well myself.

Realism falls short of reality. It shrinks it, attenuates it, falsifies it; it does not take into account our basic truths and our fundamental obsessions: love, death, astonishment. It presents man in a reduced and estranged perspective. Truth is in our dreams, in the imagination.

Of course, not everything is unsayable in words, only the living truth.

Banality is a symptom of non-communication. Men hide behind their cliches.

Nothing makes me more pessimistic than the obligation not to be pessimistic.

Why was I born, if it wasn't forever?

It's not a certain society that seems ridiculous to me, it's mankind.

No society has been able to abolish human sadness, no political system can deliver us from the pain of living, from our fear of death, our thirst for the absolute. It is the human condition that directs the social condition, not vice versa.

Only the ephemeral is of lasting value.

To become conscious of what is horrifying and to laugh at it is to become master of that which is horrifying

People always try to find base motives behind every good action. We are afraid of pure goodness and of pure evil.

There are more dead people than living. And their numbers are increasing. The living are getting rarer.

A really conscientious doctor ought to die with his patient. The captain goes down with his ship.

You've always made the mistake of being yourself.