Eugene Ionesco Quotes on Death & Dying (5 Quotes)

Realism, whether it be socialist or not, 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.

Beauty is a precious trace that eternity causes to appear to us and that it takes away from us. A manifestation of eternity, and a sign of death as well.

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.

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.

I believe that in the history of art and of thought there has always been at every living moment of culture a ''will to renewal.'' This is not the prerogative of the last decade only. All history is nothing but a succession of ''crises'' -- of rupture, repudiation and resistance. When there is no ''crisis,'' there is stagnation, petrifaction and death. All thought, all art is aggressive.