Elias Canetti Quotes
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You keep taking note of whatever confirms your ideas-better to write down what refutes and weakens them!
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Montaigne the I-sayer. 'I' as space, not as position.
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You can tirelessly keep on reading the same author, revere, admire, praise him, exalt him to the skies, know and recite each of his sentences by heart, and yet remain completely unaffected by him, as if he had never demanded anything of you and not said anything at all.
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I love writers who limit themselves, who write beneath their intelligence.
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When he has nothing to say, he lets words speak.
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When I leaf through Fackel issues of my slave years, I am seized by horror. Anyone released from bondage must feel like this.
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I hate judgments that only crush and don’t transform.
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I noticed in the front row a small, very pale, almost white man, old, tremendously alert, old in the only way I love old age, namely more alive for all the years, more attentive, more unrelenting, expectant and ready, as though he still had to make up his mind about most things and must not disregard anything.
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Say the most personal thing, say it, nothing else matters, don’t be ashamed, the generalities can be found in the newspaper.
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If one has lived long enough, there is danger of succumbing to the word 'God' merely because it was always there.
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I can’t be twenty-two again. I can’t subject myself to the same compulsion that, at the time, appeared to me as freedom and gave me wings.
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The unconscious, which those who always speak of it least possess.
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One who obeys himself suffocates as surely as one who obeys others.
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There is something impure in the laments about the dangers of our time, as if they could serve to excuse our personal failure.
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You need the rhetoric of others, the aversion it inspires, in order to find the way out of your own.
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Whenever the truth threatens, he hides behind a thought.
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Nothing was better for you than humiliation, for there was nothing you felt more deeply.
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'Life experience' does not amount to very much and could be learned from novels alone, e.g., from Balzac, without any help from life.
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The story of your youth must not turn into a catalog of what became important in your later life. It must also contain the dissipation, the failure, and the waste.
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'He is a lesser figure than X'-how it pleases an Englishman to say that! Never suspecting what basement that would put him in, a wood louse.
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A mind, lean in its own language. In others, it gets fat.
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Ehrgeiz ist der Tod des Denkens.
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It amazes me how a person to whom literature means anything can take it up as an object of study.
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One needs time to free oneself of wrong convictions. If it happens too suddenly, they go on festering.