Eugene Ionesco Quotes - Page 2

The end of childhood is when things cease to astonish us. When the world seems familiar, when one has got used to existence, one has become an adult.

I've always been suspicious of collective truths. I think an idea is true when it hasn't been put into words and that the moment it's put into words it becomes exaggerated. Because the moment it's put into words there's an abuse, an excess in the expression of the idea that makes it false.

The Arts are man's most useless ... and essential ... activity.

To tear ourselves away from the everyday, from habit, from mental laziness which hides from us the strangeness of reality, we must receive something like a real bludgeon blow.

We are all looking for something of extraordinary importance whose nature we have forgotten; I am writing the memoirs of a man who has lost his memory.

Explanation separates us from astonishment, which is the only gateway to the incomprehensible.

You can only predict things after they have happened.

Drama lies in extreme exaggeration of the feelings, an exaggeration that dislocates flat everyday reality.

We are made to be immortal, and yet we die. It's horrible, it can't be taken seriously

The more I try to explain myself, the less I understand myself.

To me the world seems grotesque, absurd, ridiculous, painful.

Logic is a very beautiful thing. As long as it is not abused.

We have not the time to take our time.

It's when I am fully conscious that I ask questions.

Why do people always expect authors to answer questions? I am an author because I want to ask questions. If I had answers, I'd be a politician.

Since the death instinct exists in the heart of everything that lives, since we suffer from trying to repress it, since everything that lives longs for rest, let us unfasten the ties that bind us to life, let us cultivate our death wish, let us develop it, water it like a plant, let it grow unhindered. Suffering and fear are born from the repression of the death wish.

Everything that has been will be, everything that will be is, everything that will be has been.

It's only when I say that everything is incomprehensible that I come as close as possible to understanding the only thing it is given to us to understand.

Language should almost break up or explode in its fruitless effort to contain so many meanings.

Boredom flourishes too, when you feel safe. It's a symptom of security.

Many people have delusions of grandeur but you're deluded by triviality.

A work of art is above all an adventure of the mind.

Childhood is over the moment things are no longer astonishing.

I'll never waste my dreams by falling asleep. Never again.

Dreams are reality at its most profound, and what you invent is truth because invention, by its nature, can't be a lie.