152 Quotes by Elias Canetti

A ''modern'' man has nothing to add to modernism, if only because he has nothing to oppose it with. The well-adapted drop off the dead limb of time like lice.

A ‘modern’ man has nothing to add to modernism, if only because he has nothing to oppose it with. The well-adapted drop off the dead limb of time like lice.

Relearn astonishment.

As if one could know the good a person is capable of, when one doesn’t know the bad he might do.

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

Success listens only to applause. To all else it is deaf.

Death is a scandal. The machine is functioning, we are all hostages.

A tormenting thought: as of a certain point, history was no longer real. Without noticing it, all mankind suddenly left reality; everything happening since then was supposedly not true; but we supposedly didn’t notice. Our task would now be to find that point, and as long as we didn’t have it, we would be forced to abide in our present destruction.

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.