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“It is not the answer that enlightens, but the question.”
-- Eugene Ionesco
#Funny #Education #Teaching
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“Why do people always expect authors to answer questions? I am an author because I want to ask questions. If I had answers, I'd be a politician.”
-- Eugene Ionesco
#Writing #People #Answers
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“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
#Depression #Death #Pain
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“I personally would like to bring a tortoise onto the stage, turn it into a racehorse, then into a hat, a song, a dragoon and a fountain of water. One can dare anything in the theatre and it is the place where one dares the least.”
-- Eugene Ionesco
#Song #Water #Theatre
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“A writer never has a vacation. For a writer, life consists of either writing or thinking about writing.”
-- Eugene Ionesco
#Travel #Writing #Thinking
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“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
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“A work of art is above all an adventure of the mind.”
-- Eugene Ionesco
#Art #Travel #Adventure
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“Mediocrity is more dangerous in a critic than in a writer.”
-- Eugene Ionesco
#Writing #Mediocrity #Dangerous
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“The Arts are man's most useless ... and essential ... activity.”
-- Eugene Ionesco
#Art #Men #Essentials
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“If I write a new play, my point of view may be profoundly modified. I may be obliged to contradict myself and I may no longer know whether I still think what I think.”
-- Eugene Ionesco
#Writing #Thinking #Views
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“We are all looking for something of extraordinary importance whose nature we have forgotten; I am writing the memoirs of a man who has lost his memory.”
-- Eugene Ionesco
#Memories #Writing #Men
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“Boredom flourishes too, when you feel safe. It's a symptom of security.”
-- Eugene Ionesco
#Boredom #Safe #Symptoms
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“A nose that can see is worth two that sniff.”
-- Eugene Ionesco
#Two #Noses
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“Childhood is over the moment things are no longer astonishing.”
-- Eugene Ionesco
#Childhood #Moments
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“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
#Children #Light #Rose
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“There are more dead people than living. And their numbers are increasing. The living are getting rarer.”
-- Eugene Ionesco
#Death #Numbers #People
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“Everything that has been will be, everything that will be is, everything that will be has been.”
-- Eugene Ionesco
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“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
#Beauty #Death #Causes
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“Shakespeare was the great one before us. His place was between God and despair.”
-- Eugene Ionesco
#Despair
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“Ideologies separate us. Dreams and anguish bring us together.”
-- Eugene Ionesco
#Inspiring #Dream #Teacher
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“Nothing makes me more pessimistic than the obligation not to be pessimistic.”
-- Eugene Ionesco
#Pessimistic #Obligation
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“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
#Hate #Night #Silence
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“For me, it is as though at every moment the actual world had completely lost its actuality. As though there was nothing there; asthough there were no foundations for anything or as though it escaped us. Only one thing, however, is vividly present: the constant tearing of the veil of appearances; the constant destruction of everything in construction. Nothing holds together, everything falls apart.”
-- Eugene Ionesco
#Fall #Together #World
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“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
#People #Insanity #Trying
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“The critic should describe, and not prescribe....”
-- Eugene Ionesco
#Should #Critics
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“Drama lies in extreme exaggeration of the feelings, an exaggeration that dislocates flat everyday reality.”
-- Eugene Ionesco
#Drama #Lying #Reality
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“It's when I am fully conscious that I ask questions.”
-- Eugene Ionesco
#Philosophical #Conscious
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“As soon as one knows one is going to die, childhood is over.... So one can be grown up at seven. Then, I believe most human beings forget what they have understood, recover another sort of childhood that can last all their lives. It is not a true childhood but a kind of forgetting. Desires and anxieties are there, preventing you from having access to the essential truth.”
-- Eugene Ionesco
#Believe #Philosophical #Childhood
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“Explanation separates us from astonishment, which is the only gateway to the incomprehensible.”
-- Eugene Ionesco
#Astonishment #Gateways #Explanation
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“We have not the time to take our time.”
-- Eugene Ionesco
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