Eugene Ionesco's Quotes

A work of art is above all an adventure of the mind.

Ideologies separate us. Dreams and anguish bring us together.

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.

It is not the answer that enlightens, but the question.

We have not the time to take our time.

Explanation separates us from astonishment, which is the only gateway to the incomprehensible.

Like all revolutions, the surrealist revolution was a reversion, a restitution, an expression of vital and indispensable spiritual needs.

Living is abnormal.

A civil servant doesn't make jokes.

A nose that can see is worth two that sniff.

Everything that has been will be, everything that will be is, everything that will be has been.

You can only predict things after they have happened.

A man with a soul is not like every other man.

Shakespeare was the great one before us. His place was between God and despair.

The critic should describe, and not prescribe.

There is no religion in which everyday life is not considered a prison; there is no philosophy or ideology that does not think that we live in alienation.

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.