Top 111 Quotes & Sayings by Eugene Ionesco
Explore popular quotes and sayings by a French dramatist Eugene Ionesco.
Last updated on September 17, 2024.
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.
Perhaps I abandoned criticism because I am full of contradictions, and when you write an essay, you are not supposed to contradict yourself. But in the theater, by inventing various characters, you can. My characters are contradictory not only in their language but in their behavior as well.
Explanation separates us from astonishment, which is the only gateway to the incomprehensible.
Woe betide the man who refuses to conform.
I've always been suspicious of collective truths.
All theatre is absurd.
Cut off from his religious, metaphysical and transcendental roots, man is lost; all his actions become senseless, absurd, useless.
Everything that has been will be, everything that will be is, everything that will be has been.
We have not the time to take our time.
It is not the answer that enlightens, but the question.
My plays have been performed before children, workers, and peasants, and they have well understood the meaning of my theatre. What is needed for people to watch my theatre is a freshness and openness of mind.
Art goes beyond politics. Even if there are writers who are involved in politics, eventually, in one or two centuries, it's not their politics which is going to count, but the fact of having given life to feelings, of having created characters and made a living work of art.
The artist can be above political parties, he can belong in a political party, he can act in politics.
I have the vanity to think that every play I have written is different from the previous ones. Yet, even though they are written in a different way, they all deal with the same themes, the same preoccupations. 'Exit the King' is also 'The Bald Soprano.'
Like all revolutions, the surrealist revolution was a reversion, a restitution, an expression of vital and indispensable spiritual needs.
When I was nine, the teacher asked us to write a piece about our village fete. He read mine in class. I was encouraged and continued. I even wanted to write my memoirs at the age of ten. At twelve I wrote poetry, mostly about friendship - 'Ode to Friendship.' Then my class wanted to make a film, and one little boy suggested that I write the script.
Often, alas, the most detestable kind of bourgeois is the anti-bourgeois kind of bourgeois.
I was born near Bucharest, but my parents came to France a year later. We moved back to Romania when I was thirteen, and my world was shattered. I hated Bucharest, its society, and its mores - its anti-Semitism for example.
Living is abnormal.
A work of art is above all an adventure of the mind.
I look out the chair while eating my pillow. I open the wall, I walk with my ears. I have ten eyes to walk with and two fingers to look with. I put my head on the floor to sit down, I put my bottom on the ceiling. After eating the music box, I spread jam on the rug for a great dessert.
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.
Politics separate men by bringing them together only superficially. Art and culture unite us in a common anguish that is our only possible fraternity, that of our existential and metaphysical community.
Shakespeare was the great one before us. His place was between God and despair.
A man with a soul is not like every other man.
Culture cannot be separated from politics. The arts, philosophy and metaphysics, religion and the sciences, constitute culture. Politics are the science or art of organizing our relationships to allow for the development of life in society.
A civil servant doesn't make jokes.
Ideologies separate us. Dreams and anguish bring us together.
You can only predict things after they have happened.
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.
A nose that can see is worth two that sniff.
The critic should describe, and not prescribe.
You've always made the mistake of being yourself.
Banality is a symptom of non-communication. Men hide behind their cliches.
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.
People always try to find base motives behind every good action. We are afraid of pure goodness and of pure evil.
All cats die. Socrates is dead. Therefore Socrates is a cat.
Every work of art (unless it is a psuedo-intellectualist work, a work already comprised in some ideology that it merely illustrates, as with Brecht) is outside ideology, is not reducible to ideology. Ideology circumscribes without penetrating it. The absence of ideology in a work does not mean an absence of ideas; on the contrary it fertilizes them.
The more I try to explain myself, the less I understand myself.
The Arts are man's most useless ... and essential ... activity.
We are made to be immortal, and yet we die. It's horrible, it can't be taken seriously
Only the ephemeral is of lasting value.
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.
God is dead. Marx is dead. And I don't feel so well myself.
If one does not understand the usefulness of the useless and the uselessness of the useful, one cannot understand art.
There are more dead people than living. And their numbers are increasing. The living are getting rarer.
A really conscientious doctor ought to die with his patient. The captain goes down with his ship.
Boredom flourishes too, when you feel safe. It's a symptom of security.
Why was I born, if it wasn't forever?
Nothing makes me more pessimistic than the obligation not to be pessimistic.
Of course, not everything is unsayable in words, only the living truth.
In the name of religion, one tortures, persecutes, builds pyres. In the guise of ideologies, one massacres, tortures and kills. In the name of justice one punishes...in the name of love of one's country or of one's race hates other countries, despises them, massacres them. In the name of equality and brotherhood there is suppression and torture. There is nothing in common between the means and the end, the means go far beyond the end...ideologies and religion... are the alibis of the means.
Theatre is simply what cannot be expressed by any other means; a complexity of words, movements, gestures that convey a vision of the world inexpressible in any other way.
Realism 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.
Many people have delusions of grandeur but you're deluded by triviality.
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.
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.
The supreme trick of mass insanity is that it persuades you that the only abnormal person is the one who refuses to join in the madness of others, the one who tries vainly to resist. We will never understand totalitarianism if we do not understand that people rarely have the strength to be uncommon.
It isn't what people think that is important, but the reason they think what they think.
To become conscious of what is horrifying and to laugh at it is to become master of that which is horrifying
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