Inspirational Quotations

Inspirational Quotes by Eugene Ionesco (French Dramatist)

Eugène Ionesco (1912–94,) born Eugen Ionescu, was a Romanian-born French dramatist. One of the foremost figures of the French Avant-garde theatre, he pioneered a new style of drama that came to be called the Theatre of the Absurd, in which the absurdity of man’s condition was mirrored in a dramatic form of hypothetical situations without traditional narrative continuity or meaningful and coherent dialogue.

Born in Slatina, Romania, Ionesco was educated in Bucharest and Paris, where he settled in 1940. Many of Ionesco’s plays are in one act: La Cantatrice chauve (1950; U.K.: The Bald Prima Donna, 1956; U.S.: The Bald Soprano, 1958) and Les Chaises (1952; The Chairs, 1957.) La Cantatrice chauve inspired a revolution in dramatic techniques and helped inaugurate the Theatre of the Absurd.

Ionesco’s other plays include Amédée, ou Comment s’en débarrasser (1954; Amedee, 1955,) Le Tableau (1955; The Picture, 1968) and Rhinocéros (1959; Rhinoceros, 1960.) His later plays received less attention outside France: they include Jeux de massacre (1970; Wipe-Out Game, 1971,) Macbett (1972; 1973,) and Voyage chez les morts (1980; Journey among the Dead, 1983.) He also wrote essays, children’s stories, and a novel Le Solitaire (1973; The Hermit, 1974.)

Ionesco remains among the most influential dramatists of the 20th century. He is celebrated for popularizing diverse nonrepresentational and surrealistic techniques and making them agreeable to audiences habituated to a naturalistic convention in the theatre.

More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Eugene Ionesco

The light of memory, or rather the light that memory lends to things, is the palest light of all. I am not quite sure whether I am dreaming or remembering, whether I have lived my life or dreamed it. Just as dreams do, memory makes me profoundly aware of the unreality, the evanescence of the world, a fleeting image in the moving water.
—Eugene Ionesco
Topics: Memory

Boredom flourishes too, when you feel safe. It’s a symptom of security.
—Eugene Ionesco
Topics: Boredom

The universe seems to me infinitely strange and foreign. At such a moment I gaze upon it with a mixture of anguish and euphoria; separate from the universe, as though placed at a certain distance outside it; I look and I see pictures, creatures that move in a kind of timeless time and spaceless space, emitting sounds that are a kind of language I no longer understand or ever register.
—Eugene Ionesco
Topics: Universe, The Universe

There is nothing truer than myth: history, in its attempt to “realize” myth, distorts it, stops halfway; when history claims to have “succeeded,” this is nothing but humbug and mystification. Everything we dream is “realizable.” Reality does not have to be: it is simply what it is.
—Eugene Ionesco

You can only predict things after they’ve happened.
—Eugene Ionesco
Topics: Foresight, Decisions

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
Topics: Society, Sadness

Every message of despair is the statement of a situation from which everybody must freely try to find a way out.
—Eugene Ionesco
Topics: Self-Pity, Hedonism

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
Topics: Eternity, Beauty

Explanation separates us from astonishment, which is the only gateway to the incomprehensible.
—Eugene Ionesco
Topics: Explanation

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
Topics: Inner-child

I believe that in the history of art and of thought there has always been at every living moment of culture a “will to renewal.” This is not the prerogative of the last decade only. All history is nothing but a succession of “crises”—of rupture, repudiation and resistance. When there is no “crisis,” there is stagnation, petrifaction and death. All thought, all art is aggressive.
—Eugene Ionesco
Topics: Trouble

For me, it is as though at every moment the actual world had completely lost its actuality. As though there was nothing there; as though 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
Topics: Illusion

It is not the answer that enlightens, but the question.
—Eugene Ionesco
Topics: Questions

Since the death instinct exists in the heart of everything that lives, since we suffer from trying to repress it, since everything that lives longs for rest, let us unfasten the ties that bind us to life, let us cultivate our death wish, let us develop it, water it like a plant, let it grow unhindered. Suffering and fear are born from the repression of the death wish.
—Eugene Ionesco
Topics: Death, Dying

Ideologies separate us. Dreams and anguish bring us together.
—Eugene Ionesco
Topics: Difficulty, Community, Togetherness, Dreams

Realism, whether it be socialist or not, falls short of reality. It shrinks it, attenuates it, falsifies it; it does not take into account our basic truths and our fundamental obsessions: love, death, astonishment. It presents man in a reduced and estranged perspective. Truth is in our dreams, in the imagination.
—Eugene Ionesco
Topics: Reality

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
Topics: Wonder

A work of art is above all an adventure of the mind.
—Eugene Ionesco
Topics: Art, Artists, Arts

Banality is a symptom of non-communication. Men hide behind their cliches.
—Eugene Ionesco
Topics: Boredom

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

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