Eugene Ionesco Quotes

The more I try to explain myself, the less I understand myself.

I still forget, sometimes, that I am no longer 12 years old.

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

It's only when I say that everything is incomprehensible that I come as close as possible to understanding the only thing it is given to us to understand.

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

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

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.

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.

The critic should describe, and not prescribe.

I personally would like to bring a tortoise onto the stage, turn it into a racehorse, then into a hat, a song, a dragoon and a fountain of water. One can dare anything in the theatre and it is the place where one dares the least.

Beauty is a precious trace that eternity causes to appear to us and that it takes away from us. A manifestation of eternity, and a sign of death as well.

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.

The human comedy does not attract me enough. I am not entirely of this world. I am from elsewhere, and it is worth finding this elsewhere beyond the walls...but where is it?

A man with a soul is not like every other man.

To me the world seems grotesque, absurd, ridiculous, painful.

DAISY: I never knew you were such a realist-I thought you were more poetic. Where's your imagination? There are many sides to reality. Choose the one that's best for you. Escape into the world of imagination.

Many people have delusions of grandeur but you're deluded by triviality.

Mediocrity is more dangerous in a critic than in a writer.

I long for solitude and yet I cannot stand it.

For me, it is as though at every moment the actual world had completely lost its actuality. As though there was nothing there; asthough there were no foundations for anything or as though it escaped us. Only one thing, however, is vividly present: the constant tearing of the veil of appearances; the constant destruction of everything in construction. Nothing holds together, everything falls apart.

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

People who don't read are brutes. It is better to write than to make war, isn't it?

The Arts are man's most useless ... and essential ... activity.

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.

Ideologies separate us. Dreams and anguish bring us together.

We haven't the time to take out time.

I'll never waste my dreams by falling asleep. Never again.

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.

I've always been suspicious of collective truths.

Everything that has been will be, everything that will be is, everything that will be has been.

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.

We have not the time to take our time.

People always try to find base motives behind every good action. We are afraid of pure goodness and of pure evil.