Top 75 Quotes & Sayings by Elias Canetti - Page 2

A head full of stars, just not in constellation yet.

A child. . . opens and closes like a blossom.

It is important what a man still plans at the end. It shows the measure of injustice in his death.

Death is a scandal. The machine is functioning, we are all hostages

You draw closer to truth by shutting yourself off from mankind.

Travelling, one accepts everything; indignation stays at home. One looks, one listens, one is roused to enthusiasm by the most dreadful things because they are new. Good travellers are heartless.

He would like to start from scratch. Where is scratch?

There emanates from superlatives a destructive force.

Almost Kien was tempted to believe in happiness, that contemptible life-goal of illiterates. If it came of itself, without being hunted for, if you did not hold it fast by force and treated it with a certain condescension, it was permissible to endure its presence for a few days

Success listens only to applause. To all else it is deaf

There can be no Creator, simply because his grief at the fate of his creation would be inconceivable and unendurable.

I want to keep smashing myself until I am whole.

You have but to know an object by its proper name for it to lose its dangerous magic.

Everything one records contains a grain of hope, no matter how deeply it may come from despair.

I try to imagine someone saying to Shakespeare, 'Relax!