Eugene Ionesco Quotes

Quotes about:

• 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.

  Eugene Ionesco

  People, Insanity, Trying

  66 Copy quote

• It is not the answer that enlightens, but the question.

  Eugene Ionesco

  Funny, Education, Teaching

  "Choosing the Future: The Power of Strategic Thinking". Book by Stuart Wells, p. 15, 1997.

  83 Copy quote

• Ideologies separate us. Dreams and anguish bring us together.

  Eugene Ionesco

  Inspiring, Dream, Teacher

  "Sunbeams: A Book of Quotations". Book by Sy Safransky, 1990.

  46 Copy quote

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

  Eugene Ionesco

  Cat, Science, Dies

  Eugene Ionesco (2015). “Rhinoceros and Other Plays: Includes: The Leader; The Future Is in Eggs; It Takes All Kinds to Make a World”, p.17, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

  35 Copy quote

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

  Eugene Ionesco

  Art, Doe, Useless

  53 Copy quote

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

  Eugene Ionesco

  Thinking, People, Important

  "Peter's Quotations: Ideas for Our Time". Book by Laurence J. Peter, p. 468, 1977.

  19 Copy quote

• I've always been suspicious of collective truths.

  Eugene Ionesco

  Collectives, Suspicious

  8 Copy quote

• 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.

  Eugene Ionesco

  Mean, Vision, Theatre

  48 Copy quote

• 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.

  Eugene Ionesco

  Country, Hate, Mean

  42 Copy quote

• 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.

  Eugene Ionesco

  Children, Light, Rose

  40 Copy quote

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

  Eugene Ionesco

  God, Wells, Feels

  "Jewish American Literature: A Norton Anthology". Book by Jules Chametzky. Chapter: "Jewish Humor", p. 318, 2000.

  20 Copy quote

• Dreams are reality at its most profound, and what you invent is truth because invention, by its nature, can't be a lie.

  Eugene Ionesco

  Dream, Reality, Profound

  "Eugene Ionesco, The Art of Theater No. 6". Interview with Shusha Guppy, Paris Review, No. 93, www.theparisreview.org. Fall 1984.

  5 Copy quote

• A really conscientious doctor ought to die with his patient. The captain goes down with his ship.

  Eugene Ionesco

  Doctors, Captains, Ships

  9 Copy quote

• Realism falls short of reality. It shrinks it, attenuates it, falsifies it; it does not take into account our basic truths and our fundamental obsessions: love, death, astonishment. It presents man in a reduced and estranged perspective. Truth is in our dreams, in the imagination.

  Eugene Ionesco

  Love, Dream, Fall

  43 Copy quote

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

  Eugene Ionesco

  Death, Forever, Born

  Eugene Ionesco, Charles Marowitz (2015). “Exit the King, The Killer, Macbett”, p.35, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

  5 Copy quote

• Banality is a symptom of non-communication. Men hide behind their cliches.

  Eugene Ionesco

  Communication, Men, Cliche

  90 Copy quote

• No society has been able to abolish human sadness, no political system can deliver us from the pain of living, from our fear of death, our thirst for the absolute. It is the human condition that directs the social condition, not vice versa.

  Eugene Ionesco

  Depression, Death, Pain

  "A Reply to Kenneth Tynan: The Playwright's Role". The Observer, June 29, 1958.

  65 Copy quote

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

  Eugene Ionesco

  Courses

  5 Copy quote

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

  Eugene Ionesco

  Death, Numbers, People

  Eugene Ionesco (2015). “Rhinoceros and Other Plays: Includes: The Leader; The Future Is in Eggs; It Takes All Kinds to Make a World”, p.16, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

  26 Copy quote

• You've always made the mistake of being yourself.

  Eugene Ionesco

  Being Yourself, Mistake, Made

  14 Copy quote

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

  Eugene Ionesco

  Pessimistic, Obligation

  8 Copy quote

• Only the ephemeral is of lasting value.

  Eugene Ionesco

  Time, Simplicity, Ephemeral

  17 Copy quote

• To become conscious of what is horrifying and to laugh at it is to become master of that which is horrifying

  Eugene Ionesco

  Laughing, Conscious, Masters

  27 Copy quote

• Boredom flourishes too, when you feel safe. It's a symptom of security.

  Eugene Ionesco

  Blessing, Boredom, Safe

  14 Copy quote

• The end of childhood is when things cease to astonish us. When the world seems familiar, when one has got used to existence, one has become an adult.

  Eugene Ionesco

  Childhood, Adults, World

  18 Copy quote

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