Elias Canetti Quotes

• All the things one has forgotten scream for help in dreams

  Elias Canetti

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Dreams, Philosophy

• 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

  Topics in Fear

  Tags in Man

• Whenever you observe an animal closely, you feel as if a human being sitting inside were making fun of you.

  Elias Canetti

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Human Being, Fun

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

  Elias Canetti

  Topics in Justice

  Tags in Production, Food

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Man, Modernism

• It doesn’t matter how new an idea is: what matters is how new it becomes.

  Elias Canetti

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Idea

• His head is made of stars, but not yet arranged into constellations.

  Elias Canetti

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Stars

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

  Elias Canetti

  Topics in Death

  Tags in Guilty

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

  Elias Canetti

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Person

• Every decision is liberating, even if it leads to disaster. Otherwise, why do so many people walk upright and with open eyes into their misfortune?

  Elias Canetti

  Topics in Decisions

  Tags in Liberating, Disaster

• 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

  Topics in Death

  Tags in Language, Earth

• 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

  Topics in Children

  Tags in Practise, Deception

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Planet, Survival

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Philosophers, Thoughts

• There is no doubt: the study of man is just beginning, at the same time that his end is in sight.

  Elias Canetti

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Study, Man

• When you write down your life, every page should contain something no one has ever heard about.

  Elias Canetti

  Topics in Life

  Tags in Yourself

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

  Elias Canetti

  Topics in God

• 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

  Topics in Fear

  Tags in Burglar

• The process of writing has something infinite about it. Even though it is interrupted each night, it is one single notation.

  Elias Canetti

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Writing, Process

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

  Elias Canetti

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Great, Writers And Writing, Aphorisms

Elias Canetti (32)

Birth:	25th July, 1905
Death:	14th August, 1994
Nationality:	British
Profession:	Novelist, Playwright

About

Elias Canetti was born in Ruse, Bulgaria. He was an English novelist and playwright. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1981, "for writings marked by a broad outlook, a wealth of ideas and artistic power". He gained a degree in chemistry from the University of Vienna in 1929, but never worked as a chemist. He is known chiefly for his celebrated trilogy of autobiographical memoirs of his childhood and of pre-Anschluss Vienna, for his modernist novel Die Blendung, and for Crowds and Power, a study of crowd behaviour as it manifests itself in human activities ranging from mob violence to religious congregations.

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