Top 90 Elias Canetti Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “In eternity everything is just beginning.”

— Elias Canetti

2. “Understanding, as we understand it, is misunderstanding.”

— Elias Canetti

3. “Learning is the art of ignoring.”

— Elias Canetti

4. “Relearn astonishment.”

— Elias Canetti

5. “One should not confuse the craving for life with endorsement of it.”

— Elias Canetti

6. “You draw closer to truth by shutting yourself off from mankind.”

— Elias Canetti

7. “There is no such thing as an ugly language. Today I hear every language as if it were the only one, and when I hear of one that is dying, it overwhelms me as though it were the death of the earth.”

— Elias Canetti

8. “Every decision is liberating, even if it leads to disaster.”

— Elias Canetti

9. “I want to keep smashing myself until I am whole.”

— Elias Canetti

10. “A person often falls very ill in order to become someone else and then returns to health much disappointed.”

— Elias Canetti

11. “There is nothing that man fears more than the touch of the unknown.”

— Elias Canetti

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

— Elias Canetti

13. “All the things one has forgotten scream for help in dreams.”

— Elias Canetti

14. “It is always the enemy who started it, even if he was not the first to speak out, he was certainly planning it; and if he was not actually planning it, he was thinking of it; and, if he was not thinking of it, he would have thought of it.”

— Elias Canetti

15. “He would like to start from scratch. Where is scratch?”

— Elias Canetti

16. “Rulers who want to unleash war know very well that they must procure or invent a first victim.”

— Elias Canetti

17. “It doesn’t matter how new an idea is: what matters is how new it becomes.”

— Elias Canetti

18. “Success is the space one occupies in the newspaper. Success is one day’s insolence.”

— Elias Canetti

19. “Whether or not God is dead: it is impossible to keep silent about him who was there for so long.”

— Elias Canetti

20. “Speak as though it were the last sentence allowed you.”

— Elias Canetti

21. “In five minutes the earth would be a desert, and you cling to books.”

— Elias Canetti

Featured in: Reading Quotes

22. “You keep taking note of whatever confirms your ideas – better to write down what refutes and weakens them!”

— Elias Canetti

23. “Most religions do not make men better, only warier.”

— Elias Canetti

24. “There is nothing that man fears more than the touch of the unknown. He wants to see what is reaching towards him, and to be able to recognize or at least classify it. Man always tends to avoid physical contact with anything strange.”

— Elias Canetti

25. “His head is made of stars, but not yet arranged into constellations.”

— Elias Canetti

26. “Explain nothing. Put it there. Say it. Leave.”

— Elias Canetti

27. “Everything one records contains a grain of hope, no matter how deeply it may come from despair.”

— Elias Canetti

28. “Each organism raises its head over a field of corpses, smiles into the sun, and declares life good.”

— Elias Canetti

29. “People’s fates are simplified by their names.”

— Elias Canetti

30. “The hallucinations of alcoholics provide us with an opportunity to study crowds as they appear in the minds of individuals.”

— Elias Canetti

31. “I cannot become modest; too many things burn in me; the old solutions are falling apart; nothing has been done yet with the new ones. So I begin, everywhere at once, as if I had a century ahead of me.”

— Elias Canetti

32. “Slumbering in every human being lies an infinity of possibilities, which one must not arouse in vain. For it is terrible when the whole man resonates with echoes and echoes, none becoming a real voice.”

— Elias Canetti

33. “Whenever you observe an animal closely, you feel as if a human being sitting inside were making fun of you.”

— Elias Canetti

Featured in: Fun Quotes

34. “The self- explorer, whether he wants to or not, becomes the explorer of everything else. He learns to see himself, but suddenly, provided he was honest, all the rest appears, and it is as rich as he was, and, as a final crowning, richer.”

— Elias Canetti

35. “People love as self-recognition what they hate as an accusation.”

— Elias Canetti

36. “The self-explorer, whether he wants to or not, becomes the explorer of everything else.”

— Elias Canetti

37. “The act of naming is the great and solemn consolation of mankind.”

— Elias Canetti

38. “There can be no Creator, simply because his grief at the fate of his creation would be inconceivable and unendurable.”

— Elias Canetti

39. “There is no doubt: the study of man is just beginning, at the same time that his end is in sight.”

— Elias Canetti

40. “You have but to know an object by its proper name for it to lose its dangerous magic.”

— Elias Canetti

41. “He who is obsessed by death is made guilty by it.”

— Elias Canetti

42. “A murder shared with many others, which is not only safe and permitted, but indeed recommended, is irresistible to the great majority of men.”

— Elias Canetti

43. “Someone who always has to lie discovers that every one of his lies is true.”

— Elias Canetti

44. “History portrays everything as if it could not have come otherwise. History is on the side of what happened.”

— Elias Canetti

45. “Of all the words in all languages I know, the greatest concentration is in the English word I.”

— Elias Canetti

46. “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.”

— Elias Canetti

47. “In the hierarchy of man’s activities, eating was the lowest. Eating had become the object of a cult, but in fact it was but the preliminary to other, utterly contemptible motions. It occurred to him that he wanted to perform one of these too.”

— Elias Canetti

48. “The fear of burglars is not only the fear of being robbed, but also the fear of a sudden and unexpected clutch out of the darkness.”

— Elias Canetti

49. “Every command leaves behind a painful sting in the person who is forced to carry it out.”

— Elias Canetti

50. “There emanates from superlatives a destructive force.”

— Elias Canetti