Quotes by 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.
• Ideologies separate us. Dreams and anguish bring us together.
• A civil servant doesn't make jokes.
• A man with a soul is not like every other man.
• A nose that can see is worth two that sniff.
• A work of art is above all an adventure of the mind.
• 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.
• Everything that has been will be, everything that will be is, everything that will be has been.
• The critic should describe, and not prescribe.
• I've always been suspicious of collective truths.
• You can only predict things after they have happened.
• It is not the answer that enlightens, but the question.
• Like all revolutions, the surrealist revolution was a reversion, a restitution, an expression of vital and indispensable spiritual needs.
• Living is abnormal.
• Shakespeare was the great one before us. His place was between God and despair.
• 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.
• We have not the time to take our time.
• Explanation separates us from astonishment, which is the only gateway to the incomprehensible.