Elias Canetti
Elias Canetti
Elias Canettiwas a German language author, born in Bulgaria, and later a British citizen. He was a modernist novelist, playwright, memoirist and non-fiction writer. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1981, "for writings marked by a broad outlook, a wealth of ideas and artistic power"...
NationalitySwiss
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth25 July 1905
CountrySwitzerland
want smashing whole
I want to keep smashing myself until I am whole.
self want self-knowledge
The self-explorer, whether he wants to or not, becomes the explorer of everything else.
war want firsts
Rulers who want to unleash war know very well that they must procure or invent a first victim.
acceptance self want
The self- explorer, whether he wants to or not, becomes the explorer of everything else. He learns to see himself, but suddenly, provided he was honest, all the rest appears, and it is as rich as he was, and, as a final crowning, richer.
men want able
There is nothing that man fears more than the touch of the unknown. He wants to see what is reaching towards him, and to be able to recognize or at least classify it. Man always tends to avoid physical contact with anything strange.
thinking speaks-out enemy
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.
deaf applause
Success listens only to applause. To all else it is deaf
fear pessimism boring
Pessimists are not boring. Pessimists are right. Pessimists are superfluous.
fate names people
People's fates are simplified by their names
philosophical despair may
Everything one records contains a grain of hope, no matter how deeply it may come from despair.
hate self people
People love as self-recognition what they hate as an accusation.
creativity ideas what-matters
It doesn't matter how new an idea is: what matters is how new it becomes.
stars constellations
A head full of stars, just not in constellation yet.
real lying men
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.