Quote

History portrays everything as if it could not have come otherwise. History is on the side of what happened.

Elias Canetti

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Elias Canetti
Age: 89 †
Born: 1905
Born: July 25
Died: 1994
Died: August 14
Aphorist
Author
Chemist
Essayist
Novelist
Playwright
Writer
Rousse
Elías Canetti
History
Everything
Come
Portrays
Otherwise
Side
Sides
Happened

More quotes by Elias Canetti

Image
One should not confuse the craving for life with endorsement of it.
Elias Canetti
Image
There is nothing that man fears more than the touch of the unknown. He wants to see what is reaching towards him, and to be able to recognize or at least classify it. Man always tends to avoid physical contact with anything strange.
Elias Canetti
Image
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
Image
The self-explorer, whether he wants to or not, becomes the explorer of everything else.
Elias Canetti
Image
There is no such thing as an ugly language. Today I hear every language as if it were the only one, and when I hear of one that is dying, it overwhelms me as though it were the death of the earth.
Elias Canetti
Image
Justice requires that everyone should have enough to eat. But it also requires that everyone should contribute to the production of food.
Elias Canetti
Image
It is important to say all the great thoughts again, without knowing that they have already been said.
Elias Canetti
Image
Words are not too old, only people are too old if they use the same words too frequently.
Elias Canetti
Image
Rulers who want to unleash war know very well that they must procure or invent a first victim.
Elias Canetti
Image
As if one could know the good a person is capable of, when one doesn't know the bad he might do.
Elias Canetti
Image
Of all the words in all languages I know, the greatest concentration is in the English word I.
Elias Canetti
Image
Someone who always has to lie discovers that every one of his lies is true
Elias Canetti
Image
Death is a scandal. The machine is functioning, we are all hostages
Elias Canetti
Image
Whether or not God is dead: it is impossible to keep silent about him who was there for so long.
Elias Canetti
Image
He would like to start from scratch. Where is scratch?
Elias Canetti
Image
Whenever you observe an animal closely, you feel as if a human being sitting inside were making fun of you.
Elias Canetti
Image
Speak as though it were the last sentence allowed you.
Elias Canetti
Image
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
Image
Success is the space one occupies in the newspaper. Success is one day's insolence.
Elias Canetti
Image
Beauty always has something remote.
Elias Canetti