Great Throughts Treasury

This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.

Elias Canetti

Bulgarian Novelist, Playwright, Memoirist and Non-Fiction Writer

"Mankind has collected together all the wisdom of his ancestors, and can see what a fool man is."

"All the things one has forgotten scream for help in dreams."

"Justice requires that everyone should have enough to eat. But it also requires that everyone should contribute to the production of food."

"The most difficult thing for one who does not believe in God: that he has no one to give thanks to."

"It doesn't matter how new an idea is: what matters is how new it becomes."

"Most religions do not make men better, only warier."

"One should use praise to recognize what one is not. "

"People love as self-recognition what they hate as an accusation."

"As if one could know the good a person is capable of, when one doesn't know the bad he might do. "

"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."

"Whether or not God is dead: it is impossible to keep silent about him who was there for so long. "

"A Bookseller might be a King, but a King will never be a Bookseller."

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

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

"Ambition is the death of thought."

"And what if you were told: One more hour?"

"Another woman catches sight of Fischerle's hump on the ground and runs screaming into the street: 'Murder! Murder!' She takes the hump for a corpse. Further details - she knows none. The murderer is very thin, a poor sap, how he came to do it, you shouldn't have thought it of him. Shot may be, someone suggests. Of course, everyone heard the shot. Three streets off, the shot had been heard. Not a bit of it, that was a motor tyre. No, it was a shot! The crowd won't be done out of its shot. A threatening attitude is assumed towards the doubters. Don't let him go. An accessory. Trying to confuse the trail! Out of the building comes more news. The woman's statements are revised. The thin man has been murdered. And the corpse on the floor? It's alive. It's the murderer, he had hidden himself. He was tring to creep away between the corpse's legs when he was caught. The more recent information is more detailed. The little man is a dwarf. What do you expect, a cripple! The blow was actually struck by another. A redheaded man. Ah, those redheads. The dwarf put him up to it. Lynch him! The woman gave the alarm. Cheers for the woman! She screamed and screamed. A Woman! Doesn't know what fear is. The murderer had threatened her. The redhead. It's always the Reds. He tore her collar off. No shooting. Of course not. What did he say? Someone must have invented the shot. The dwarf. Where is he? Inside. Rush the doors! No one else can get in. It's full up. What a murder! The woman had a plateful. Thrashed her every day. Half dead, she was. What did she marry a dwarf for? I wouldn't marry a dwarf. And you with a big man to yourself. All she could find. Too few men, that's what it is. The war! Young people to-day...Quite young he was too. Not eighteen. And a dwarf already. Clever! He was born that way. I know that. I've seen him. Went in there. Couldn't stand it. Too much blood. That's why he's so thin. An hour ago he was a great, fat man. Loss of blood, horrible! I tell you corpses swell. That's drowned ones. What do you know about corpses? Took all the jewelry off the corpse he did. Did it for the jewelry. Just outside the jewelry department it was. A pearl necklace. A baroness. He was her footman. No, the baron. Ten thousand pounds. Twenty thousand! A peer of the realm! Handsome too. Why did she send him? Should he have let his wife? It's for her to let him. Ah, men. She's alive though. He's the corpse. Fancy dying like that! A peer of the realm too Serve him right. The unemployed are starving. What's he want with a pearl necklace. String 'em up I say! Mean it too. The whole lot of them. And the Theresianum too. Burn it! Make a nice blaze."

"Beauty always has something remote."

"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."

"A philosopher ought to be someone for whom people remain as important as ideas."

"Almost Kien was tempted to believe in happiness, that contemptible life-goal of illiterates. If it came of itself, without being hunted for, if you did not hold it fast by force and treated it with a certain condescension, it was permissible to endure its presence for a few days."

"Adults find pleasure in deceiving a child. They consider it necessary, but they also enjoy it. The children very quickly figure it out and then practice deception themselves."

"He imagined the footsteps of his fingers on her chubby, fat, shiny cheek. But for what reason one cheek would be privileged. It would fight with both hands at once. If you do not hit the red stripes are on the one hand above the other below. That would be ugly. Study of Chinese art has forged in him a passionate love of symmetry."

"Books have no life; they lack feeling maybe, and perhaps cannot feel pain, as animals and even plants feel pain. But what proof have we that inorganic objects can feel no pain? Who knows if a book may not yearn for other books, its companions of many years, in some way strange to us and therefore never yet perceived?"

"Death is a scandal. The machine is functioning, we are all hostages."

"He sometimes tells himself that there is nothing more to be said, simply because he won’t get around to saying it.—How contemptible!"

"He who is obsessed by death is made guilty by it."

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

"Every decision is liberating, even if it leads to disaster. Otherwise, why do so many people walk upright and with open eyes into their misfortune?"

"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."

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

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

"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?"

"His head is made of stars, but not yet arranged into constellations."

"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."

"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."

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

"I have no sounds that could serve to soothe me, no violoncello like him, no lament that anyone would recognize as a lament because it sounds subdued, in an inexpressibly tender language. I have only these lines on the yellowish paper and words that are never new, for they keep saying the same thing through an entire life."

"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."

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

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

"I try to imagine someone saying to Shakespeare, 'Relax!'"

"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."

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

"In love, assurances are practically an announcement of their opposite."

"In every human being lie infinite possibilities, which must not be triggered in vain. Since it is terrible when the whole man resonates with so many echoes, none of which becomes a real voice."

"It is always the enemy who started it, even if he was not the first to speak out, he was certainly planning it; and if he was not actually planning it, he was thinking of it; and, if he was not thinking of it, he would have thought of it."

"Invention's quality of surprise, its advantage, can also be arbitrary. Later, in the context of our own lives, this arbitrariness is no longer possible. We must stay with that which our best understanding tells is is the truth. This truth is what matters, and it is on its account that we set down our life in writing."

"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."

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