Elias Canetti quotes - page 3

A mind, lean in its own language. In others, it gets fat. (Elias Canetti)
I was never drawn to experiment with language; I take note of such experiments, but avoid them in my own writing. The reason is that the substance of life claims me completely. To indulge in linguistic experiments is to ignore the greater part of this substance, leaving all but a tiny portion untouched and unused, as if a musician were to ceaselessly play an instrument with his little finger only.
Elias Canetti
You don't have to know a philosopher's every syllable to know why he rubs you the wrong way. You may know it best after a few of his sentences, and les and less well after that. The important thing is to see his web and move away before you tear it.
Elias Canetti
You keep taking note of whatever confirms your ideas-better to write down what refutes and weakens them!
Elias Canetti
The story of your youth must not turn into a catalog of what became important in your later life. It must also contain the dissipation, the failure, and the waste.
Elias Canetti
... how could I, fool that I am, go on sitting in my office, or here at home, instead of leaping onto a train with my eyes shut and opening them only when I am with you?
Elias Canetti
Relearn astonishment, stop grasping for knowledge, lose the habit of the past.
Elias Canetti
Is there still a possibility of public truth? The prime condition for that would be that you pose your own questions, not just answer them. The questions of others have a distorting influence, one adapts to them, accepts words and concepts that should be avoided at all costs. Ideally, you should use only words which you have filled with new meaning.
Elias Canetti
Montaigne the I-sayer. "I” as space, not as position.
Elias Canetti
One who obeys himself suffocates as surely as one who obeys others.
Elias Canetti
He sometimes tells himself that there is nothing more to be said, simply because he won't get around to saying it.-How contemptible! (Elias Canetti)
One needs time to free oneself of wrong convictions. If it happens too suddenly, they go on festering.
Elias Canetti
I can't be twenty-two again. I can't subject myself to the same compulsion that, at the time, appeared to me as freedom and gave me wings.
Elias Canetti
Ambition is the death of thought.
Elias Canetti
Everything you rejected and pushed aside-take it up again.
Elias Canetti
You need the rhetoric of others, the aversion it inspires, in order to find the way out of your own.
Elias Canetti
You can tirelessly keep on reading the same author, revere, admire, praise him, exalt him to the skies, know and recite each of his sentences by heart, and yet remain completely unaffected by him, as if he had never demanded anything of you and not said anything at all.
Elias Canetti
As if one could know the good a person is capable of, when one doesn't know the bad he might do.
Elias Canetti
People's fates are simplified by their names.
Elias Canetti
"Life experience” does not amount to very much and could be learned from novels alone, e.g., from Balzac, without any help from life.
Elias Canetti
There is no doubt: the study of man is just beginning, at the same time that his end is in sight. (Elias Canetti)
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
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
He gathers the things he would have seen and piles them up.
Elias Canetti
He will not do death the honor of taking it into account.
Elias Canetti