Eugene Ionesco Quotes

FIRE CHIEF: Life is very simple, really. [To the Smiths:] Go on and kiss each other.

I've always been suspicious of collective truths.

I am told, in a dream ... you can only get the answer to all your questions through a dream. So in my dream, I fall asleep, and I dream, in my dream, that I'm having that absolute, revealing dream.

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.

All cats die. Socrates is dead. Therefore Socrates is a cat.

In the history of humanity there are no civilizations or cultures which fail to manifest, in one or a thousand ways, this need for an absolute that is called heaven, freedom, a miracle, a lost paradise to be regained, peace, the going beyond History ... 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 ... Humanity has always had a nostalgia for the freedom that is only beauty, that is only real; life, plenitude, light.

If one does not understand the usefulness of the useless and the uselessness of the useful, one cannot understand art.

God is dead. Marx is dead. And I don't feel so well myself.

Language should almost break up or explode in its fruitless effort to contain so many meanings.

Ever since I was fifteen, that is to say from that moment when I lost all that was left me of my childhood, from the moment when I ceased to be aware of the present and knew only the past hurrying into the future, that is to say into the abyss, ever since I became fully conscious of time I have felt old and I have wanted to live. I have run after life as though to catch time, and I have tried to live. I have run after life so much that it has always escaped me, I have run, I have never been late and never too early, and yet I have never caught up with it: it is as though I have run alongside of it.
What is life, I may be asked. For me, life is not Time; it is not this state of existence, for ever escaping us, slipping between our fingers and vanishing like a ghost as soon as you try to grasp it. For me it is, it must be, the present, presentness, plenitude. I have run after life so much that I have lost it.

To me the world seems grotesque, absurd, ridiculous, painful.

The human comedy does not attract me enough. I am not entirely of this world. I am from elsewhere, and it is worth finding this elsewhere beyond the walls ... but where is it?

I am, it seems, an avant-garde dramatist. It would even seem obvious since I am present here at discussions on the avant-garde theatre. It is all entirely official. But what does the term avant-garde mean?

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

There are more dead people than living. And their numbers are increasing. The living are getting rarer.

I still forget, sometimes, that I am no longer 12 years old.

Describe a circle, stroke its back and it turns vicious.

I'll never waste my dreams by falling asleep. Never again.

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

I ought not to have stirred, I was swept into the dance, caught up in the whirling movement of things. Being in Time means running after the present. You run after things, you run with things, you flow away.

We are made to be immortal, and yet we die. It's horrible, it can't be taken seriously

As soon as one knows one is going to die, childhood is over ... So one can be grown up at seven. Then, I believe most human beings forget what they have understood, recover another sort of childhood that can last all their lives. It is not a true childhood but a kind of forgetting. Desires and anxieties are there, preventing you from having access to the essential truth.

People, they all have the word goodness on lips a bloody knife between their teeth.

Oh righteous doom, that they who make Pleasure their only end, Ordering the whole life for its sake, Miss that whereto they tend. While they who bid stern duty lead, Content to follow, they, Of duty only taking heed, Find pleasure by the way.

Childhood is over the moment things are no longer astonishing.

People always try to find base motives behind every good action. We are afraid of pure goodness and of pure evil.

All men die in solitude; all values are degraded in a state of misery: that is what Shakespeare tells me

He would say ect. instead of ect., and thus instead of ect., instead of ect. and thus and so forth!

Within the confines of the great, universal prison, I had made for myself a smaller prison, a prison made to order. I had carved out for myself a little niche in which I could live. It was tiny, I had no doubt about that point. But at least it was made to measure, to my measure. A little niche in a prison that kept me from seeing the prison. A prison without work? Was I bored? Was I resigned? Tired, no doubt.

I just can't get used to life.

Only the ephemeral is of lasting value.

Truth has only two sides, but it's the third side that's best.

Nothing makes me more pessimistic than the obligation not to be pessimistic.

Dreams are reality at its most profound.

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.

Not so with our characters. They have no metaphysics, no order, no law. They are miserable and they don't know why. They are puppets, undone. In short, they represent modern man. Their situation is not tragic, since it has no relation to a higher order. Instead, it's ridiculous, laughable, and derisory.

The fact that I despise religion doesn't mean I don't esteem it highly.

It's when I am fully conscious that I ask questions.

People who don't read are brutes.

We haven't the time to take our time.

You've always made the mistake of being yourself.

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.

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

Drama lies in extreme exaggeration of the feelings, an exaggeration that dislocates flat everyday reality.

As I said, I started with poetry, and I also wrote criticism and dialogue. But I realized that I was most successful at dialogue. 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.

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.

The poet cannot invent new words every time, of course. He uses the words of the tribe. But the handling of the word, the accent, a new articulation, renew them.

Logic is a very beautiful thing. As long as it is not abused.

Every message of despair is the statement of a situation from which everybody must freely try to find a way out.

All the plays that have ever been written, from ancient Greece to the present day, have never really been anything but thrillers ... Drama's always been realistic and there's always been a detective about ... Every play's an investigation brought to a successful conclusion.

If I write a new play, my point of view may be profoundly modified. I may be obliged to contradict myself and I may no longer know whether I still think what I think.

We have not the time to take our time.

Living is abnormal.

It's not a certain society that seems ridiculous to me, it's mankind,

Rhinoceros The Leader The Future is in Eggs or It Takes all Sorts to Make a World

I have always considered imaginative truth to be more profound, more loaded with significance, than every day reality ... Everything we dream about, and by that I mean everything we desire, is true (the myth of Icarus came before aviation, and if Ader or Bleriot started flying it is because all men have dreamed of flight). There is nothing truer than myth ... Reality does not have to be: it is simply what is.

I read a page of Plato's great work. I can no longer understand anything, because behind the words on the page, which have their own heavenly brightness, to be sure, there shines an even brighter, an enormous, dazzling -why- that blots out everything, cancels out, destroys all meaning. All individual intelligence. When one has understood, one stops, satisfied with what one has understood. I do not understand. Understanding is far too little. To have understood is to be fixed, immobilized. It is as though one wanted to stop on one step in the middle of a staircase, or with one foot in the void and the other on the endless stair. But a mere why, a new why can set one off again, can unpetrify what was petrified and everything starts flowing afresh. How can one understand? One cannot.

For me, it is as though at every moment the actual world had completely lost its actuality. As though there was nothing there; asthough 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.

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

You can only predict things after they have happened.

Why do people always expect authors to answer questions? I am an author because I want to ask questions. If I had answers, I'd be a politician.

What's chivalrous about saying you've seen a rhinoceros?

It isn't what people think that is important, but the reason they think what they think

Why was I born, if it wasn't forever?

I am not capitulating.

I started writing for the theatre because I hated it.

But even if I know what governs their trajectory, if I know the rules of the movement of things and how things are organized and how certain mutations, transformations, gestations take place, even if I know all that, I shall only have learnt how to get along after a fashion in the enormous gaol, the oppressive prison in which I am held. What a farce, what a snare, what a booby-trap. We were born cheated. For if we are not to know, if there is nothing to know, why do we have this longing to know?

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. Just as dreams do, memory makes me profoundly aware of the unreality, the evanescence of the world, a fleeting image in the moving water.

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

I am sad when I think that the years go by like sacks that we mark "Returned Empty," sad when I think that we shall be separated from one another and from ourselves.

It is true that all authors have tried to make propaganda. The great ones are those who failed, who have gained access, consciously or not, to a deeper and more universal reality.

A civil servant doesn't make jokes.

Politicians are either there or here or totally at home. Their finitude is more than sufficient unto itself. I don't mean to imply that I'm any better than they which does not mean that they are any better than I. Which doesn't mean anything at all.

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.

A writer never has a vacation. For a writer, life consists of either writing or thinking about writing.

I don't believe in seeing evil in everything. I leave that to the inquisitors.

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

If I tell these private thoughts of mine, it is because I know they are not mine alone, and that practically everyone is trying to say the same things and that the writer is only a man who says out loud what other people think or whisper.

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 person who has not completely lost the memory of paradise, even though it is a faint one, will suffer endlessly. He will feel the call of the essential world, will hear the voice that comes from so far away that one cannot find out where it comes from, a voice that cannot guide him.

Good men make good rhinoceroses, unfortunately.

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.

I have no other pictures of the world apart from those which express evanescence, and callousness, vanity and anger, emptiness, orhideous useless hate. Everything has merely confirmed what I had seen and understood in my childhood: futile and sordid fits of rage, cries suddenly blanketed by the silence, shadows swallowed up for ever by the night.

The Arts are man's most useless ... and essential ... activity.