Quotes by Eugene Ionesco

About Eugene Ionesco:

Eugène Ionesco was a Romanian playwright who wrote mostly in French, and one of the foremost figures of the French Avant-garde theatre. Beyond ridiculing the most banal situations, Ionesco's plays depict the solitude and insignificance of human existence in a tangible way.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

I read a page of Plato's great work. I can no longer understand anything, because behind the words on the page, which have their own heavenly brightness, to be sure, there shines an even brighter, an enormous, dazzling -why- that blots out everything...

Eugene Ionesco

But even if I know what governs their trajectory, if I know the rules of the movement of things and how things are organized and how certain mutations, transformations, gestations take place, even if I know all that, I shall only have learnt how to g...

Eugene Ionesco

Of course, not everything is unsayable in words, only the living truth.

Eugene Ionesco

Oh words, what crimes are committed in your name? ~Jack or The Submission

Eugene Ionesco

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

Eugene Ionesco

Year after year of dirty snow and bitter winds… houses and whole districts of people who aren’t really unhappy, but worse, who are neither happy nor unhappy; people who are ugly because they’re neither ugly nor beautiful; creatures that are dis...

Eugene Ionesco

I have always considered imaginative truth to be more profound, more loaded with significance, than every day reality... Everything we dream about, and by that I mean everything we desire, is true (the myth of Icarus came before aviation, and if Ader...

Eugene Ionesco

I'll never waste my dreams by falling asleep. Never again.

Eugene Ionesco

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

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

Ideologies separate us. Dreams and anguish bring us together.

Eugene Ionesco

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

Eugene Ionesco

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.

Eugene Ionesco

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

Eugene Ionesco

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

Eugene Ionesco

I've always been suspicious of collective truths.

Eugene Ionesco

A nose that can see is worth two that sniff.

Eugene Ionesco

The critic should describe, and not prescribe.

Eugene Ionesco

You can only predict things after they have happened.

Eugene Ionesco

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

Eugene Ionesco

Author Bio

  • NameEugene Ionesco
  • DescriptionRomanian playwright
  • AliasesIonesco
  • BornNovember 26, 1909
  • DiedMarch 28, 1994
  • CountryFrance; Romania
  • ProfessionPlaywright; Writer
  • AwardsOrder Of Merit For Arts And Science; Austrian State Prize For European Literature; Prince Pierre Foundation