Top 90 Elias Canetti Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “People sit together, bare their teeth and eat and, even in this critical moment, feel no desire to eat each other. They respect themselves for this, and respect their companions for an abstemiousness equal to their own.”

— Elias Canetti

52. “A ‘modern’ man has nothing to add to modernism, if only because he has nothing to oppose it with. The well-adapted drop off the dead limb of time like lice.”

— Elias Canetti

53. “Fear thrives strongest; there is no telling how little we would be without having suffered fear. An intrinsic characteristic of humanity is the tendency to give in to fear. No fear is lost, but its hiding places are a riddle. Perhaps, of all things, fear is the one that changes least.”

— Elias Canetti

54. “There is, in Kafka, a sort of sleep-worship; he regards sleep as a panacea.”

— Elias Canetti

55. “The fingers of the attacker feel what will soon belong to his whole body.”

— Elias Canetti

56. “The paranoiac is the exact image of the ruler. The only difference is their position in the world. One might even think the paranoiac the more impressive of the two because he is sufficient unto himself and cannot be shaken by failure.”

— Elias Canetti

57. “Travelling, one accepts everything; indignation stays at home. One looks, one listens, one is roused to enthusiasm by the most dreadful things because they are new. Good travellers are heartless.”

— Elias Canetti

58. “Success listens only to applause. To all else it is deaf.”

— Elias Canetti

59. “The planet’s survival has become so uncertain that any effort, any thought that presupposes an assured future amounts to a mad gamble.”

— Elias Canetti

60. “Ionako ne postoji oskudica u osrednjim glavama.”

— Elias Canetti

61. “Beauty always has something remote.”

— Elias Canetti

62. “The fluid boundary between individuals and types is a true concern of the real writer.”

— Elias Canetti

63. “Almost Kien was tempted to believe in happiness, that contemptible life-goal of illiterates. If it came of itself, without being hunted for, if you did not hold it fast by force and treated it with a certain condescension, it was permissible to endure its presence for a few days.”

— Elias Canetti

64. “Every command consists of momentum and sting. The momentum forces the recipient to act, and to act in accordance with the content of the command; the sting remains behind in him. When a command functions normally and as one expects, there is nothing to be seen of the sting; it is hidden and unsuspected and may only reveal its existence by some faint, scarcely perceptible recalcitrance before the command obeyed.”

— Elias Canetti

65. “It is important to say all the great thoughts again, without knowing that they have already been said.”

— Elias Canetti

66. “One needs time to free oneself of wrong convictions. If it happens too suddenly, they go on festering.”

— Elias Canetti

67. “The family becomes rigid and hard when it excludes others from its meals; those that must be fed provide a natural pretext for the exclusion of others. The hollowness of this pretext is revealed by families which have no children and yet make not the slightest move to share their meal with others. The ‘family’ of two is man’s most contemptible creation.”

— Elias Canetti

68. “At home in the nursery, I usually played alone. Actually, I seldom played, I spoke to the wallpaper. The many dark circles in the pattern of the wallpaper seemed like people to me. I made up stories in which they appeared, either I told them the stories or they played with me, I never got tired of the wallpaper people and I could talk to them for hours.”

— Elias Canetti

69. “A crowd exists so long as it has an unattained goal.”

— Elias Canetti

70. “The crowd is the same everywhere, in all periods and cultures; it remains essentially the same among men of the most diverse origin, education and language. Once in being, it spreads with the utmost violence. Few can resist its contagion; it always wants to go on growing and there are no inherent limits to its growth. It can arise wherever people are together, and its spontaneity and suddenness are uncanny.”

— Elias Canetti

71. “Pessimists are not boring. Pessimists are right. Pessimists are superfluous.”

— Elias Canetti

72. “The Englishman likes to imagine himself at sea, the German in a forest. It is impossible to express the difference of their national feeling more concisely.”

— Elias Canetti

73. “The process of writing has something infinite about it. Even though it is interrupted each night, it is one single notation.”

— Elias Canetti

74. “The freedom to fail is preserved, as a sort of supreme law, which guarantees escape at every fresh juncture. One is inclined to call this the freedom of the weak person who seeks salvation in defeat. His true uniqueness, his special relation to power, is expressed in the prohibition of victory. All calculations originate and end in impotence.”

— Elias Canetti

75. “The profoundest thoughts of the philosophers have something trickle about them. A lot disappears in order for something to suddenly appear in the palm of the hand.”

— Elias Canetti

76. “One should use praise to recognize what one is not.”

— Elias Canetti

77. “The great writers of aphorisms read as if they had all known each other well.”

— Elias Canetti

78. “What proof have we that inorganic objects can feel no pain? Who knows if a book may not yearn for other books, its companions of many years, in some way strange to us and therefore never yet perceived?”

— Elias Canetti

79. “His meals were always punctual. Whether she cooked well or badly he did not know; it was a matter of total indifference to him. During his meals, which he ate at his writing desk, he was busy with important considerations. As a rule he would not have been able to say what precisely he had in his mouth. He reserved consciousness for real thoughts; they depend upon it; without consciousness, thoughts are unthinkable. Chewing and digestion happen of themselves.”

— Elias Canetti

80. “The first effect of adjusting to other people is that one becomes boring.”

— Elias Canetti

81. “As if one could know the good a person is capable of, when one doesn’t know the bad he might do.”

— Elias Canetti

82. “It is important what a man still plans at the end. It shows the measure of injustice in his death.”

— Elias Canetti

83. “Words are not too old, only people are too old if they use the same words too frequently.”

— Elias Canetti

84. “Every decision is liberating, even if it leads to disaster. Otherwise, why do so many people walk upright and with open arms into their misfortune?”

— Elias Canetti

85. “The process of writing has something infinite about it. Even though it is interrupted each night, it is one single notation, and it seems most true when it eschews artistic devices of any sort.”

— Elias Canetti

86. “One has a prejudice wherever one fears a transformation.”

— Elias Canetti

87. “When you write down your life, every page should contain something no one has ever heard about.”

— Elias Canetti

88. “How unfair, he thought; I can close my mouth whenever I like, as tight as I like, and what has a mouth to say? It is there for taking in nourishment, yet it is well defended, but ears – ears are a prey to every onslaught.”

— Elias Canetti

89. “She was crude, but loyal. He began to understand her even better than before. A pity she was so old; it was too late to try to make a human being of her.”

— Elias Canetti

90. “Savor powerlessness, after power, in every phase that matches it precisely; replace every old triumph with the new defeat; strengthen yourself on your weakness; win yourself back when so very lost.”

— Elias Canetti

91. “What is it that happens in an inflation? The unit of money suddenly loses its identity. The crowd it is part of starts growing and, the larger it becomes, the smaller becomes the worth of each unit. The millions one always wanted are suddenly there in one’s hand, but they are no longer millions in fact, but only in name.”

— Elias Canetti

92. “Disgust at collective killing is of very recent date and should not be over-estimated. Today everyone takes part in public executions through the newspapers. Like everything else, however, it is more comfortable than it was. We sit peacefully at home and, out of a hundred details, can choose those to linger over which offer a special thrill. We only applaud when everything is over and there is no feeling of guilty connivance to spoil our pleasure.”

— Elias Canetti

93. “He panted for silence as others do for air.”

— Elias Canetti

94. “Those most beset by commands are children. It is a miracle that they ever survive the pressure and do not collapse under the burden of the commands laid on them by their parents and teachers. That they in turn, and in equally cruel form, should give identical commands to their children is as natural as mastication or speech.”

— Elias Canetti

95. “I’ve nothing, am nothing, shall be nothing, and yet I take nothing.”

— Elias Canetti