E Canetti Quotes & Sayings

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. — Elias Canetti

Rulers who want to unleash war know very well that they must procure or invent a first victim. — Elias Canetti

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

He who is obsessed by death is made guilty by it. — Elias Canetti

One needs time to free oneself of wrong convictions. If it happens too suddenly, they go on festering. — Elias Canetti

It is always the enemy who started it, even if he was not the first to speak out, he was certainly planning it; and if he was not actually planning it, he was thinking of it; and, if he was not thinking of it, he would have thought of it. — Elias Canetti

Slumbering in every human being lies an infinity of possibilities, which one must not arouse in vain. For it is terrible when the whole man resonates with echoes and echoes, none becoming a real voice. — Elias Canetti

The act of naming is the great and solemn consolation of mankind — Elias Canetti

Since the death of his daughter, a consumptive, he had not thrashed a woman; he lived alone. — Elias Canetti

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

No mind ever grew fat on a diet of novels. The pleasure which they occasionally offer is far too heavily paid for: they undermine the finest characters. They teach us to think ourselves into other men's places. Thus we acquire a taste for change. The personality becomes dissolved in pleasing figments of imagination. The reader learns to understand every point of view. Willingly he yields himself to the pursuit of other people's goals and loses sight of his own. Novels are so many wedges which the novelist, an actor with his pen, inserts into the closed personality of the reader. The better he calculates the size of the wedge and the strength of the resistance, so much the more completely does he crack open the personality of the victim. Novels should be prohibited by the State. — Elias Canetti

The remaining, less developed characters, were still either listening or laughing. They were divided between curiosity and satisfaction. They felt happy, but did not know it. — Elias Canetti

For I believe that part of knowledge is its desire to show itself and its refusal to put up with a merely hidden existence. I find mute knowledge dangerous, for it grows ever more mute and ultimately secret, and must then avenge itself for being secret. — Elias Canetti

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

The hand which scoops up the water is the first vessel. The fingers of both hands intertwined are the first basket. [p. 217] — Elias Canetti

Words are not too old, only people are too old if they use the same words too frequently. — Elias Canetti

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

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

Learning is the art of ignoring. — Elias Canetti

Success is the space one occupies in the newspaper. Success is one day's insolence. — Elias Canetti

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

How unfair, he thought; I can close my mouth whenever I like, as tight as I like, and what has a mouth to say? It is there for taking in nourishment, yet it is well defended, but ears - ears are a prey to every onslaught. — Elias Canetti

Elias Canetti once tried to imagine a world in which 'all weapons [were] abolished and in the next war only biting [was] allowed'. Can we be sure there would be no genocides in such a radically disarmed world? — Niall Ferguson

People use their leaders almost as an excuse. When they give in to the leader's commands they can always reserve the feeling that these commands are are alien to them, that they are the leader's responsibility, that the terrible acts they are committing are in his name and not theirs. This, then, is another thing that makes people feel so guiltless, as Canetti points out: they can imagine themselves as temporary victims of the leader. The more they give in to his spell, and the more terrible the crimes they commit, the more they can feel that the wrongs are not natural to them. It is all so neat, this usage of the leader; it reminds us of James Franzer's discovery that in the remote past tribes often used their kings as scapegoats who, when they no longer served the people's needs, were put to death. These are the many ways in which men can play the hero, all the while that they are avoiding responsibility for their own acts in a cowardly way. — Ernest Becker

One should use praise to recognize what one is not. — Elias Canetti

There emanates from superlatives a destructive force. — Elias Canetti

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

It is important to say all the great thoughts again, without knowing that they have already been said. — Elias Canetti

In the hierarchy of man's activities, eating was the lowest. Eating had become the object of a cult, but in fact it was but the preliminary to other, utterly contemptible motions. It occurred to him that he wanted to perform one of these too. — Elias Canetti

I want to keep smashing myself until I am whole. — Elias Canetti