Elias Canetti Quotes

60 Sourced Quotes

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

Elias Canetti
All the things one has forgotten scream for help in dreams.

Elias Canetti
There is nothing that man fears more than the touch of the unknown.

Elias Canetti
When you write down your life, every page should contain something no one has ever heard about

Elias Canetti
The fear of burglars is not only the fear of being robbed, but also the fear of a sudden and unexpected clutch out of the darkness.

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

Elias Canetti
I can't be twenty-two again. I can't subject myself to the same compulsion that, at the time, appeared to me as freedom and gave me wings.

Elias Canetti
Invention's quality of surprise, its advantage, can also be arbitrary. Later, in the context of our own lives, this arbitrariness is no longer possible. We must stay with that which our best understanding tells is is the truth. This truth is what matters, and it is on its account that we set down our life in writing.

Elias Canetti
If one has lived long enough, there is danger of succumbing to the word God merely because it was always there.

Elias Canetti
Montaigne the I-sayer. I as space, not as position.

Elias Canetti
I noticed in the front row a small, very pale, almost white man, old, tremendously alert, old in the only way I love old age, namely more alive for all the years, more attentive, more unrelenting, expectant and ready, as though he still had to make up his mind about most things and must not disregard anything.

Elias Canetti
I hate judgments that only crush and don't transform.

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

Elias Canetti
The unconscious, which those who always speak of it least possess.

Elias Canetti
You need the rhetoric of others, the aversion it inspires, in order to find the way out of your own.

Elias Canetti
Whenever you observe an animal closely, you have the feeling that a person sitting inside is making fun of you.

Elias Canetti
I love writers who limit themselves, who write beneath their intelligence.

Elias Canetti
One who obeys himself suffocates as surely as one who obeys others.

Elias Canetti
Say the most personal thing, say it, nothing else matters, don't be ashamed, the generalities can be found in the newspaper.

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
Justice begins with the recognition of the necessity of sharing.

Elias Canetti
Relearn astonishment, stop grasping for knowledge, lose the habit of the past.

Elias Canetti
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

Elias Canetti
There is something impure in the laments about the dangers of our time, as if they could serve to excuse our personal failure.

Elias Canetti
People who cannot find their way out of history are lost, and so are their nations.

Elias Canetti
You can tirelessly keep on reading the same author, revere, admire, praise him, exalt him to the skies, know and recite each of his sentences by heart, and yet remain completely unaffected by him, as if he had never demanded anything of you and not said anything at all.

Elias Canetti
When I leaf through Fackel issues of my slave years, I am seized by horror. Anyone released from bondage must feel like this.

Elias Canetti
Everything you rejected and pushed aside—take it up again.

Elias Canetti
Is there still a possibility of public truth?
The prime condition for that would be that you pose your own questions, not just answer them. The questions of others have a distorting influence, one adapts to them, accepts words and concepts that should be avoided at all costs.
Ideally, you should use only words which you have filled with new meaning.

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

Elias Canetti