Eugene Ionesco Professions : Playwright Born : November 26, 1909 Died : March 28, 1994 Browse All Authors Top 106 quotes by Eugene Ionesco 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. Eugene Ionesco trying insanity people It is not the answer that enlightens, but the question. Eugene Ionesco teaching education funny If one does not understand the usefulness of the useless and the uselessness of the useful, one cannot understand art. Eugene Ionesco useless doe art 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. Eugene Ionesco vision theatre mean In the name of religion, one tortures, persecutes, builds pyres. In the guise of ideologies, one massacres, tortures and kills. In the name of justice one punishes...in the name of love of one's country or of one's race hates other countries, despises them, massacres them. In the name of equality and brotherhood there is suppression and torture. There is nothing in common between the means and the end, the means go far beyond the end...ideologies and religion... are the alibis of the means. Eugene Ionesco hate mean country 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, our thirst for the absolute. It is the human condition that directs the social condition, not vice versa. Eugene Ionesco pain depression death 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 dream love fall 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 light rose children Drama lies in extreme exaggeration of the feelings, an exaggeration that dislocates flat everyday reality. Eugene Ionesco writing drama lying It's only when I say that everything is incomprehensible that I come as close as possible to understanding the only thing it is given to us to understand. Eugene Ionesco philosophical given understanding All cats die. Socrates is dead. Therefore Socrates is a cat. Eugene Ionesco dies cat science Many people have delusions of grandeur but you're deluded by triviality. Eugene Ionesco delusions-of-grandeur illusions-of-grandeur people Ideologies separate us. Dreams and anguish bring us together. Eugene Ionesco dream inspiring teacher God is dead. Marx is dead. And I don't feel so well myself. Eugene Ionesco wells god feels A writer never has a vacation. For a writer, life consists of either writing or thinking about writing. Eugene Ionesco writing travel thinking It isn't what people think that is important, but the reason they think what they think. Eugene Ionesco important people thinking Only the ephemeral is of lasting value. Eugene Ionesco simplicity ephemeral time 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. Eugene Ionesco childhood adults world I have no other pictures of the world apart from those which express evanescence, and callousness, vanity and anger, emptiness, orhideous useless hate. Everything has merely confirmed what I had seen and understood in my childhood: futile and sordid fits of rage, cries suddenly blanketed by the silence, shadows swallowed up for ever by the night. Eugene Ionesco vanity hate night To become conscious of what is horrifying and to laugh at it is to become master of that which is horrifying Eugene Ionesco masters conscious laughing Similar Authors Alan Ayckbourn playwright Bonnie Greer playwright Annie Baker playwright August Wilson playwright August Strindberg playwright Athol Fugard playwright All Authors
