Quotes of Eugene Ionesco - somelinesforyou

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

- Eugene Ionesco

“ 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. ”

- Eugene Ionesco

“ BERENGER: And you consider all this natural? 

DUDARD: What could be more natural than a rhinoceros? 

 BERENGER: Yes, but for a man to turn into a rhinoceros is abnormal beyond question. 

DUDARD: Well, of course, that's a matter of opinion ... 

 BERENGER: It is beyond question, absolutely beyond question! 
DUDARD: You seem very sure of yourself. Who can say where the normal stops and the abnormal begins? Can you personally define these conceptions of normality and abnormality? Nobody has solved this problem yet, either medically or philosophically. You ought to know that. 

 BERENGER: The problem may not be resolved philosophically but in practice it's simple. They may prove there's no such thing as movement ... and then you start walking ... [he starts walking up and down the room] ... and you go on walking, and you say to yourself, like Galileo, 'E pur si muove' ... 

 DUDARD: You're getting things all mixed up! Don't confuse the issue. In Galileo's case it was the opposite: theoretic and scientific thought proving itself superior to mass opinion and dogmatism. 

 BERENGER: [quite lost] What does all that mean? Mass opinion, dogmatism they're just words! I may be mixing everything up in my head but you're losing yours. You don't know what's normal and what isn't any more. I couldn't care less about Galileo ... I don't give a damn about Galileo. 

 DUDARD: You brought him up in the first place and raised the whole question, saying that practice always had the last word. Maybe it does, but only when it proceeds from theory! The history of thought and science proves that. BERENGER: [more and more furious] It doesn't prove anything of the sort! It's all gibberish, utter lunacy! 

DUDARD: There again we need to define exactly what we mean by lunacy ... 

 BERENGER: Lunacy is lunacy and that's all there is to it! Everybody knows what lunacy is. And what about the rhinoceroses are they practice or are they theory? ”

- Eugene Ionesco

“ 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. ”

- Eugene Ionesco

“ Oh words, what crimes are committed in your name? ~Jack or The Submission ”

- Eugene Ionesco

“ Det er ikke sikkert at alkohol dreper alle sykdomsbasiller. Når det gjelder neshorneri, vet man ikke noe foreløbig. ”

- Eugene Ionesco

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

- Eugene Ionesco

“ I believe that in the history of art and of thought there has always been at every living moment of culture a "will to renewal." This is not the prerogative of the last decade only. All history is nothing but a succession of "crises" — of rupture, repudiation and resistance… ”

- Eugene Ionesco

“ You can only predict things after they've happened. ”

- Eugene Ionesco

“ 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. ”

- Eugene Ionesco

“ You can only predict things after they've happened. ”

- Eugene Ionesco

“ You can only predict things after they've happened. ”

- Eugene Ionesco

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

- Eugene Ionesco

“ 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. ”

- Eugene Ionesco

“ I believe that in the history of art and of thought there has always been at every living moment of culture a "will to renewal." This is not the prerogative of the last decade only. All history is nothing but a succession of "crises" — of rupture, repudiation and resistance… ”

- Eugene Ionesco

“ I've always been suspicious of collective truths. ”

- Eugene Ionesco

“ No society has been able to abolish human sadness, no political system can deliver us from the pain of living, from our fear of death, or our thirst for the absolute. It is the human condition that directs the social condition, not vice versa. ”

- Eugene Ionesco

“ A civil servant doesn't make jokes. ”

- Eugene Ionesco

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

- Eugene Ionesco

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

- Eugene Ionesco

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

- Eugene Ionesco

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

- Eugene Ionesco

“ Like all revolutions, the surrealist revolution was a reversion, a restitution, an expression of vital and indispensable spiritual needs. ”

- Eugene Ionesco

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

- Eugene Ionesco

“ A civil servant doesn't make jokes. ”

- Eugene Ionesco

“ If I denounce the absurd, I transcend the absurd by the very fact of my denunciation. For by what right should I declare a thing to be absurd, unless I had before me the image — whether sharply or vaguely defined, no matter — of something that was not absurd? ”

- Eugene Ionesco

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

- Eugene Ionesco

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

- Eugene Ionesco

“ 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. ”

- Eugene Ionesco

“ 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… ”

- Eugene Ionesco
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