Eugene Ionesco Quotes (36 Quotes)

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

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

A civil servant doesn't make jokes.

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.

Shakespeare was the great one before us. His place was between God and despair.

Living is abnormal.

You've always made the mistake of being yourself.

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

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

I am not quite sure whether I am dreaming or remembering, whether I have lived my life or dreamed it. Just as dreams do, memory makes me profoundly aware of the unreality, the evanescence of the world, a fleeting image in the moving water.

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.

The critic should describe, and not prescribe.

There is no religion in which everyday life is not considered a prison; there is no philosophy or ideology that does not think that we live in alienation.

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.

A nose that can see is worth two that sniff.

The light of memory, or rather the light that memory lends to things, is the palest light of all. . . . I am not quite sure whether I am dreaming or remembering, whether I have lived my life or dreamed it.

An avant-garde man is like an enemy inside a city he is bent on destroying, against which he rebels for like any system of government, an established form of expression is also a form of oppression.

The unpleasant thing about society today is nowadays is that there is a confusion between people and their function or rather, people are tempted to identify with the function they perform. This is what's happening, particularly in totalitarian soc

Mediocrity is more dangerous in a critic than in a writer.

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

There is nothing truer than myth history, in its attempt to ''realize'' myth, distorts it, stops halfway when history claims to have ''succeeded,'' this is nothing but humbug and mystification. Everything we dream is ''realizable.'' Reality does not have to be it is simply what it is.

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.

The universe seems to me infinitely strange and foreign. At such a moment I gaze upon it with a mixture of anguish and euphoria separate from the universe, as though placed at a certain distance outside it . . .

A man with a soul is not like every other man.

It isnt what people think thats important, but the reason they think what they think.

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

We have not the time to take our time.

Marx was wrong jealousy and pride, emotional forces, are just as responsible as hunger and necessity for our actions they explain the whole of History, and the initial fall of man.

Like all revolutions, the surrealist revolution was a reversion, a restitution, an expression of vital and indispensable spiritual needs.

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.

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

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.

Ideologies separate us. Dreams and anguish bring us together.

You can only predict things after they have happened.

For me, it is as though at every moment the actual world had completely lost its actuality. As though there was nothing there as though there were no foundations for anything or as though it escaped us. Only one thing, however, is vividly present the constant tearing of the veil of appearances the constant destruction of everything in construction. Nothing holds together, everything falls apart.

I've always been suspicious of collective truths.