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It is not the answer that enlightens, but the question.
Eugene Ionesco
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Eugene Ionesco
Age: 84 †
Born: 1909
Born: November 26
Died: 1994
Died: March 28
Diarist
Dramatist
Graphic Artist
Illustrator
Literary Critic
Playwright
Poet
Writer
Stanwood
Washington
Ionesco
Eugen Ionesco
Eugene Ionesco
Teaching
Question
Enlightens
Answers
Rhinoceros
Education
Enlightening
Funny
Questioning
Problem
Gifted
Spirituality
Answer
More quotes by Eugene Ionesco
I've always been suspicious of collective truths. I think an idea is true when it hasn't been put into words and that the moment it's put into words it becomes exaggerated. Because the moment it's put into words there's an abuse, an excess in the expression of the idea that makes it false.
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
Childhood is the world of miracle or of magic: it is as if creation rose luminously out of the night, all new and fresh and astonishing. Childhood is over the moment things are no longer astonishing. When the world gives you a feeling of déjà vu, when you are used to existence, you become an adult.
Eugene Ionesco
To me the world seems grotesque, absurd, ridiculous, painful.
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
Many people have delusions of grandeur but you're deluded by triviality.
Eugene Ionesco
The human comedy does not attract me enough. I am not entirely of this world. I am from elsewhere, and it is worth finding this elsewhere beyond the walls...but where is it?
Eugene Ionesco
Ideologies separate us. Dreams and anguish bring us together.
Eugene Ionesco
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
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
Drama lies in extreme exaggeration of the feelings, an exaggeration that dislocates flat everyday reality.
Eugene Ionesco
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?
Eugene Ionesco
We have not the time to take our time.
Eugene Ionesco
The Arts are man's most useless ... and essential ... activity.
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
A really conscientious doctor ought to die with his patient. The captain goes down with his ship.
Eugene Ionesco
To become conscious of what is horrifying and to laugh at it is to become master of that which is horrifying
Eugene Ionesco
Only the ephemeral is of lasting value.
Eugene Ionesco
Nothing makes me more pessimistic than the obligation not to be pessimistic.
Eugene Ionesco
The light of memory, or rather the light that memory lends to things, is the palest light of all. I am not quite sure whether I am dreaming or remembering, whether I have lived my life or dreamed it. Just as dreams do, memory makes me profoundly aware of the unreality, the evanescence of the world, a fleeting image in the moving water.
Eugene Ionesco
