Top 70 Eugène Ionesco Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “It is not the answer that enlightens, but the question.”

— Eugène Ionesco

2. “Only the ephemeral is of lasting value.”

— Eugène Ionesco

3. “Ideologies separate us. Dreams and anguish bring us together.”

— Eugène Ionesco

4. “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.”

— Eugène Ionesco

5. “God is dead. Marx is dead. And I don’t feel so well myself.”

— Eugène Ionesco

6. “A writer never has a vacation. For a writer, life consists of either writing or thinking about writing.”

— Eugène Ionesco

7. “All cats die. Socrates is dead. Therefore Socrates is a cat.”

— Eugène Ionesco

8. “Drama lies in extreme exaggeration of the feelings, an exaggeration that dislocates flat everyday reality.”

— Eugène Ionesco

9. “A work of art is above all an adventure of the mind.”

— Eugène Ionesco

10. “Good men make good rhinoceroses, unfortunately.”

— Eugène Ionesco

11. “Many people have delusions of grandeur but you’re deluded by triviality.”

— Eugène Ionesco

12. “There are more dead people than living. And their numbers are increasing. The living are getting rarer.”

— Eugène Ionesco

13. “When I was born, I was almost fourteen years old. That’s why I was able to understand more easily than most what it was all about.”

— Eugène Ionesco

14. “We have not the time to take our time.”

— Eugène Ionesco

15. “The critic should describe, and not prescribe...”

— Eugène Ionesco

16. “The end of childhood is when things cease to astonish us. When the world seems familiar, when one has got used to existence, one has become an adult.”

— Eugène Ionesco

17. “If one does not understand the usefulness of the useless and the uselessness of the useful, one cannot understand art.”

— Eugène Ionesco

18. “Explanation separates us from astonishment, which is the only gateway to the incomprehensible.”

— Eugène Ionesco

19. “There is nothing truer than myth: history, in its attempt to realize myth, distorts it, stops halfway; when history claims to have succeeded, this is nothing but humbug and mystification. Everything we dream is realizable. Reality does not have to be: it is simply what it is.”

— Eugène Ionesco

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

— Eugène Ionesco

21. “That’s how we stay young these days: murder and suicide.”

— Eugène Ionesco

22. “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.”

— Eugène Ionesco

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

— Eugène Ionesco

24. “Of course, not everything is unsayable in words, only the living truth.”

— Eugène Ionesco

25. “Why do people always expect authors to answer questions? I am an author because I want to ask questions. If I had answers, I’d be a politician.”

— Eugène Ionesco

26. “The brightest light, the light of Italy, the purest sky of Scandinavia in the month of June is only a half-light when one compares it to the light of childhood. Even the nights were blue.”

— Eugène Ionesco

27. “We are all looking for something of extraordinary importance whose nature we have forgotten; I am writing the memoirs of a man who has lost his memory.”

— Eugène Ionesco

28. “Every message of despair is the statement of a situation from which everybody must freely try to find a way out.”

— Eugène Ionesco

29. “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?”

— Eugène Ionesco

30. “It isn’t what people think that is important, but the reason they think what they think.”

— Eugène Ionesco

31. “I’ll never waste my dreams by falling asleep. Never again.”

— Eugène Ionesco

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

— Eugène Ionesco

33. “I’ve always been suspicious of collective truths.”

— Eugène Ionesco

34. “Nothing makes me more pessimistic than the obligation not to be pessimistic.”

— Eugène Ionesco

35. “Why was I born, if it wasn’t forever?”

— Eugène Ionesco

36. “Childhood is the world of miracle and wonder; as if creation rose, bathed...”

— Eugène Ionesco

37. “A nose that can see is worth two that sniff.”

— Eugène Ionesco

38. “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.”

— Eugène Ionesco

39. “Describe a circle, stroke its back and it turns vicious.”

— Eugène Ionesco

40. “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.”

— Eugène Ionesco

41. “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.”

— Eugène Ionesco

42. “A really conscientious doctor ought to die with his patient. The captain goes down with his ship.”

— Eugène Ionesco

43. “To me the world seems grotesque, absurd, ridiculous, painful.”

— Eugène Ionesco

44. “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.”

— Eugène Ionesco

45. “Language should almost break up or explode in its fruitless effort to contain so many meanings.”

— Eugène Ionesco

46. “You can only predict things after they have happened.”

— Eugène Ionesco

47. “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.”

— Eugène Ionesco

48. “To become conscious of what is horrifying and to laugh at it is to become master of that which is horrifying.”

— Eugène Ionesco

49. “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.”

— Eugène Ionesco

50. “A person who has not completely lost the memory of paradise, even though it is a faint one, will suffer endlessly. He will feel the call of the essential world, will hear the voice that comes from so far away that one cannot find out where it comes from, a voice that cannot guide him.”

— Eugène Ionesco