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Eugène Ionesco on Philosophy

1909–1994 France

← All quotes by Eugène Ionesco

12 quotes

I believe that what separates us all from one another is simply society itself, or, if you like, politics. This is what raises barriers between men, this is what creates misunderstanding.

There are now many invisible people on stage.

Stage directions in The Chairs (1952)

Oh words, what crimes are committed in your name!

Jacques from Jacques or the Submission (1955)

It isn't what people think that's important, but the reason they think what they think.

Peter's Quotations : Ideas for Our Time (1977)

Good men make good rhinoceroses, unfortunately.

Rhinoceros (1959)

It's not a certain society that seems ridiculous to me, it's mankind.

Encyclopedia of World Biography (1998)

I am told, in a dream ... you can only get the answer to all your questions through a dream. So in my dream, I fall asleep, and I dream, in my dream, that I'm having that absolute, revealing dream.

Two things are unacceptable: birth and death. I did not ask for them and I do not accept them.

Born in horror and pain, I also live in horrible dread of the end, the exit. I'm caught in an incredible, inadmissible, infernal trap, between two frightful events.

I didn't mean you were stupid. It's just that you're not logical, which isn't the same thing at all.

Amédée from Amédée or How to Get Rid of It (1954)

Ideologies separate us. Dreams and anguish bring us together.

Sunbeams : A Book of Quotations (1990)

Every work of art (unless it is a psuedo-intellectualist work, a work already comprised in some ideology that it merely illustrates, as with Brecht) is outside ideology, is not reducible to ideology. Ideology circumscribes without penetrating it. The absence of ideology in a work does not mean an absence of ideas; on the contrary it fertilizes them.

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Eugène Ionesco (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.