Eugene Ionesco Quotes

When I was young I read 'L'Etranger' by Camus, and it made me aware of the strangeness of life.

Sometimes I'm not into being a human.

There was an enjoyment to being alive, he felt, that because of an underlying meaninglessness–like how a person alone for too long cannot feel comfortable when with others; cannot neglect that underlying the feeling of belongingness is the certainty, really, of loneliness, and nothingness, and so experiences life in that hurried, worthless way one experiences a mistake–he could no longer get at.

The tragedy of modern man is not that he knows less and less about the meaning of his own life, but that it bothers him less and less.

At any street corner the feeling of absurdity can strike any man in the face.

What, then, is that incalculable feeling that deprives the mind of the sleep necessary to life? A world that can be explained even with bad reasons is a familiar world. But, on the other hand, in a universe suddenly divested of illusions and lights, man feels an alien, a stranger. His exile is without remedy since he is deprived of the memory of a lost home or the hope of a promised land. This divorce between man and his life, the actor and his setting, is properly the feeling of absurdity.

In our large cities, the population is godless, materialized,--no bond, no fellow-feeling, no enthusiasm. These are not men, but hungers, thirsts, fevers, and appetites walking. How is it people manage to live on,--so aimless as they are? After their peppercorn aims are gained, it seems as if the lime in their bones alone held them together, and not any worthy purpose.

They were here all at once, but not together. Survival took self-absorption, and it made them strangers with nothing to do and no way to relate. Emergencies gave you a shape and a plot to take part in, while death was no story at all. It left you nothing.

This divorce between man and his life, the actor and his setting, is properly the feeling of absurdity.

I wasn’t lonely. I experienced no self-pity. I was just caught up in a life in which I could find no meaning.

Philosophy: A route of many roads leading from nowhere to nothing.

I don't think that people accept the fact that life doesn't make sense. I think it makes people terribly uncomfortable. It seems like religion and myth were invented against that, trying to make sense out of it.

Just having the pain of being alive without anything else, whether it's good or bad. There's a lot of serious songs on the record, you know. That song is just about feeling like a fish out of water, feeling like you don't belong on the planet sometimes.

That nature does not care, one way or the other, is the true abyss. That only man cares, in his finitude facing nothing but death, alone with his contingency and the objective meaninglessness of his projecting meanings, is a truly unprecedented situation.

Life's an awfully lonesome affair. You come into the world alone and you go out of the world alone yet it seems to me you are more alone while living than even going and coming.

In the nineteenth century the problem was that God is dead. In the twentieth century the problem is that man is dead.

Alienation, I suppose, can't be hackneyed because it will always exist.

You come into the world alone and you go out of the world alone yet it seems to me you are more alone while living than even going and coming.

We're all alone in this world.

The absurd is the essential concept and the first truth.

The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless.

As far as I am concerned, I resign from humanity. I no longer want to be, nor can still be, a man. What should I do? Work for a social and political system, make a girl miserable? Hunt for weaknesses in philosophical systems, fight for moral and esthetic ideals? It’s all too little. I renounce my humanity even though I may find myself alone. But am I not already alone in this world from which I no longer expect anything?

Once you're alienated, you're on your own. That takes you to the world of the existential, where things just kind of float.

All men were alien one to another, at times, not only aliens.

Then I realized what separated us: what I thought about him could not reach him; it was psychology, the kind they write about in books. But his judgment went through me like a sword and questioned my very right to exist. And it was true, I had always realized it; I hadn't the right to exist. I had appeared by chance, I existed like a stone, a plant or a microbe. My life put out feelers towards small pleasures in every direction. Sometimes it sent out vague signals; at other times I felt nothing more than a harmless buzzing.