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Elias Canetti Quotes

Elias Canetti was a German language author, born in Ruse, Bulgaria, and later a British citizen. He was a modernist novelist, playwright, memoirist and non-fiction writer. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1981, "for writings marked by a broad outlook, a wealth of ideas and artistic power".

✵ 25. July 1905 – 14. August 1994  •  Other names E. Canetti
Elias Canetti photo

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Elias Canetti
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Elias Canetti
Elias Canetti: 43 quotes11 likes

Famous Elias Canetti Quotes

“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

Source: The Voices of Marrakesh: A Record of a Visit

“A head full of stars, just not in constellation yet.”

Elias Canetti

“Understanding, as we understand it, is misunderstanding.”

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“… 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

Source: Kafka's Other Trial: The Letters to Felice

“I cannot become modest; too many things burn in me; the old solutions are falling apart; nothing has been done yet with the new ones. So I begin, everywhere at once, as if I had a century ahead of me.”

Elias Canetti

“Everything one has forgotten cries for help in the dream.”

Elias Canetti

Alles, was man vergessen hat, schreit im Traum um Hilfe.
Die Provinz des Menschen : Aufzeichnungen 1942–1972, München 1973, p. 269

Elias Canetti Quotes about life

““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

J. Agee, trans. (1989), p. 107
Das Geheimherz der Uhr [The Secret Heart of the Clock] (1987)

“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

J. Agee, trans. (1989), p. 29
Das Geheimherz der Uhr [The Secret Heart of the Clock] (1987)

“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

J. Agee, trans. (1989), p. 3
Das Geheimherz der Uhr [The Secret Heart of the Clock] (1987)

Elias Canetti Quotes about death

“Ambition is the death of thought.”

Elias Canetti

Ehrgeiz ist der Tod des Denkens.
J. Agee, trans. (1989), p. 41
Das Geheimherz der Uhr [The Secret Heart of the Clock] (1987)

“He will not do death the honor of taking it into account.”

Elias Canetti

Er erweist dem Tod nicht die Ehre.
J. Agee, trans. (1989), p. 150
Das Geheimherz der Uhr [The Secret Heart of the Clock] (1987)

“I repulse death with all my strength. If I accepted it, I would be a murderer.”

Elias Canetti

J. Agee, trans. (1989), p. 142
Das Geheimherz der Uhr [The Secret Heart of the Clock] (1987)

Elias Canetti Quotes

“Relearn astonishment, stop grasping for knowledge, lose the habit of the past.”

Elias Canetti

J. Agee, trans. (1989), p. 146
Das Geheimherz der Uhr [The Secret Heart of the Clock] (1987)

“He gathers the things he would have seen and piles them up”

Elias Canetti

“The Blind Man” J. Neugroshel, trans. (1979), p. 13
Der Ohrenzeuge: Fünfzig Charaktere [Earwitness: Fifty Characters] 1974
Context: The blind man is not blind by birth, but he became blind with little effort. He has a camera, he takes it everywhere, and he just loves keeping his eyes closed. He walks about as though asleep, he has seen absolutely nothing as yet, and already he is shooting it, for when all things lie next to one another, equally small, equally large, always rectangular, orderly, cut off, named, numbered, proven and demonstrated, then you can see them much better in any event.
The blind man saves himself the trouble of viewing anything beforehand. He gathers the things he would have seen and piles them up and enjoys them as though they were stamps. He travels all over the world for the sake of his camera, nothing is far enough, shiny enough, strange enough—he gets it for the camera. He says: I was there, and he points to it, and if he could not point at it he would not know where he had been, the world is confusing, exotic, rich, who can retain it all.

“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

J. Agee, trans. (1989), p. 5
Das Geheimherz der Uhr [The Secret Heart of the Clock] (1987)

“Montaigne the I-sayer. “I” as space, not as position.”

Elias Canetti

J. Agee, trans. (1989), p. 54
Das Geheimherz der Uhr [The Secret Heart of the Clock] (1987)

“One who obeys himself suffocates as surely as one who obeys others.”

Elias Canetti

J. Agee, trans. (1989), p. 20
Das Geheimherz der Uhr [The Secret Heart of the Clock] (1987)

“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

J. Agee, trans. (1989), p. 92
Das Geheimherz der Uhr [The Secret Heart of the Clock] (1987)

“One needs time to free oneself of wrong convictions. If it happens too suddenly, they go on festering.”

Elias Canetti

J. Agee, trans. (1989), p. 76
Das Geheimherz der Uhr [The Secret Heart of the Clock] (1987)

“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

J. Agee, trans. (1989), p. 17
Das Geheimherz der Uhr [The Secret Heart of the Clock] (1987)

“Everything you rejected and pushed aside—take it up again.”

Elias Canetti

J. Agee, trans. (1989), p. 106
Das Geheimherz der Uhr [The Secret Heart of the Clock] (1987)

“You need the rhetoric of others, the aversion it inspires, in order to find the way out of your own.”

Elias Canetti

J. Agee, trans. (1989), p. 61
Das Geheimherz der Uhr [The Secret Heart of the Clock] (1987)

“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

J. Agee, trans. (1989), p. 43
Das Geheimherz der Uhr [The Secret Heart of the Clock] (1987)

“I love writers who limit themselves, who write beneath their intelligence.”

Elias Canetti

J. Agee, trans. (1989), p. 27
Das Geheimherz der Uhr [The Secret Heart of the Clock] (1987)

“If one has lived long enough, there is danger of succumbing to the word “God” merely because it was always there.”

Elias Canetti

J. Agee, trans. (1989), p. 108
Das Geheimherz der Uhr [The Secret Heart of the Clock] (1987)

“The once-seen does not exist yet. The always seen no longer exists.”

Elias Canetti

J. Agee, trans. (1989), p. 64
Das Geheimherz der Uhr [The Secret Heart of the Clock] (1987)

“Whenever the truth threatens, he hides behind a thought.”

Elias Canetti

J. Agee, trans. (1989), p. 22
Das Geheimherz der Uhr [The Secret Heart of the Clock] (1987)

“Nothing was better for you than humiliation, for there was nothing you felt more deeply.”

Elias Canetti

J. Agee, trans. (1989), p. 130
Das Geheimherz der Uhr [The Secret Heart of the Clock] (1987)

“One who, alone, would be unconquerable. But he weakens himself with allegiances.”

Elias Canetti

J. Agee, trans. (1989), p. 8
Das Geheimherz der Uhr [The Secret Heart of the Clock] (1987)

“When I leaf through Fackel issues of my slave years, I am seized by horror. Anyone released from bondage must feel like this.”

Elias Canetti

J. Agee, trans. (1989), p. 64
Das Geheimherz der Uhr [The Secret Heart of the Clock] (1987)

“It amazes me how a person to whom literature means anything can take it up as an object of study.”

Elias Canetti

J. Agee, trans. (1989), p. 73
Das Geheimherz der Uhr [The Secret Heart of the Clock] (1987)

“When he has nothing to say, he lets words speak.”

Elias Canetti

J. Agee, trans. (1989), p. 147
Das Geheimherz der Uhr [The Secret Heart of the Clock] (1987)

“Say the most personal thing, say it, nothing else matters, don’t be ashamed, the generalities can be found in the newspaper.”

Elias Canetti

J. Agee, trans. (1989), p. 143
Das Geheimherz der Uhr [The Secret Heart of the Clock] (1987)

“I noticed in the front row a small, very pale, almost white man, old, tremendously alert, old in the only way I love old age, namely more alive for all the years, more attentive, more unrelenting, expectant and ready, as though he still had to make up his mind about most things and must not disregard anything.”

Elias Canetti

describing Ludwig Hohl, J. Agee, trans. (1989), p. 76
Das Geheimherz der Uhr [The Secret Heart of the Clock] (1987)

“There is something impure in the laments about the dangers of our time, as if they could serve to excuse our personal failure.”

Elias Canetti

J. Agee, trans. (1989), p. 108
Das Geheimherz der Uhr [The Secret Heart of the Clock] (1987)

“The unconscious, which those who always speak of it least possess.”

Elias Canetti

J. Agee, trans. (1989), p. 145
Das Geheimherz der Uhr [The Secret Heart of the Clock] (1987)

“I hate judgments that only crush and don’t transform.”

Elias Canetti

J. Agee, trans. (1989), p. 7
Das Geheimherz der Uhr [The Secret Heart of the Clock] (1987)

“One should tell oneself how fruitful misunderstandings are. One shouldn’t despise them. One of the wisest people was a collector of misunderstandings.”

Elias Canetti

J. Agee, trans. (1989), p. 146
Das Geheimherz der Uhr [The Secret Heart of the Clock] (1987)

“His great holy books, which he does not know. They are so holy that he does not dare to open them.”

Elias Canetti

J. Agee, trans. (1989), p. 132
Das Geheimherz der Uhr [The Secret Heart of the Clock] (1987)

““He is a lesser figure than X”—how it pleases an Englishman to say that! Never suspecting what basement that would put him in, a wood louse.”

Elias Canetti

J. Agee, trans. (1989), p. 74
Das Geheimherz der Uhr [The Secret Heart of the Clock] (1987)

“A mind, lean in its own language. In others, it gets fat.”

Elias Canetti

J. Agee, trans. (1989), p. 48
Das Geheimherz der Uhr [The Secret Heart of the Clock] (1987)

“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

J. Agee, trans. (1989), p. 61
Das Geheimherz der Uhr [The Secret Heart of the Clock] (1987)

“You keep taking note of whatever confirms your ideas—better to write down what refutes and weakens them!”

Elias Canetti

J. Agee, trans. (1989), p. 60
Das Geheimherz der Uhr [The Secret Heart of the Clock] (1987)

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