Eugene Ionesco Quotes
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It's not a certain society that seems ridiculous to me, it's mankind.
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Banality is a symptom of non-communication. Men hide behind their cliches.
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Many people have delusions of grandeur but you're deluded by triviality.
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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.
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Boredom flourishes too, when you feel safe. It's a symptom of security.
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Explanation separates us from astonishment, which is the only gateway to the incomprehensible.
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It is not the answer that enlightens, but the question.
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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?
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An avant-garde man is like an enemy inside a city he is bent on destroying, against which he rebels; for like any system of government, an established form of expression is also a form of oppression. The avant-garde man is the opponent of an existing system.
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The critic should describe, and not prescribe.
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Mediocrity is more dangerous in a critic than in a writer.
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Ideologies separate us. Dreams and anguish bring us together.
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That's how we stay young these days: murder and suicide.
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People who don't read are brutes. It is better to write than to make war, isn't it?
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A man with a soul is not like every other man.
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There are more dead people than living. And their numbers are increasing. The living are getting rarer.
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Logic is a very beautiful thing. As long as it is not abused.
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The Arts are man's most useless ... and essential ... activity.
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Childhood is over the moment things are no longer astonishing.
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Why was I born, if it wasn't forever?
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Like all revolutions, the surrealist revolution was a reversion, a restitution, an expression of vital and indispensable spiritual needs.
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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.
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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.
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Childhood is the world of miracle or of magic: it is as if creation rose luminously out of the night, all new and fresh and astonishing. Childhood is over the moment things are no longer astonishing. When the world gives you a feeling of "déjà vu," when you are used to existence, you become an adult.