Elias Canetti Quotes

Man's biological weakness is the condition of human culture.

The becoming of man is the history of the exhaustion of his possibilities.

The earth is the very quintessence of the human condition.

Man is still the greatest miracle and the greatest problem on this earth.

The powers, aspirations, and mission of man are such as to raise the study of his origin and nature, inevitably and by the very necessity of the case, from the mere physiological to the psychological stage of scientific operations.

The fate of man is man.

Where do we come from? What are We? Where are we going?

In the lifetime of one person, we went from figuring out where we came from to figuring out how to get rid of ourselves.

We were all born of flesh, in a flare of pain. We do not remember the red roots whence we rose, but we know that we rose and walked, that after a while we shall lie down again.

No one recovers from the disease of being born, a deadly wound if there ever was one.

As the archeology of our thought easily shows, man is an invention of recent date. And one perhaps nearing its end.

Kubrick's vision seemed to be that humans are doomed, whereas Clarke's is that humans are moving on to a better stage of evolution.

It is peculiar to mankind to transcend mankind.

We are all racing towards death. No matter how many great, intellectual conclusions we draw during our lives, we know they're all only man-made, like God. I begin to wonder where it all leads. What can you do, except do what you can do as best you know how.

Finds progress, man's distinctive mark alone, Not God's, and not the beast's; God is, they are, Man partly is, and wholly hopes to be.

I viewed my fellow man not as a fallen angel, but as a risen ape.

Man is the only animal for whom his own existence is a problem which he has to solve.

The pursuit of eternity is no longer the prerogative of the gods - it is the business of us all, here and now.

Most people are dead. Did you know that? It's true, out of all the people that ever were, almost all of them are dead.

Any art worthy of its name should address 'life', 'man', 'nature', 'death' and 'tragedy'.

Man is not a machine that can be remodelled for quite other purposes as occasion demands, in the hope that it will go on functioning as regularly as before but in a quite different way. He carries his whole history with him; in his very structure is written the history of mankind.

Know then thyself, presume not God to scan; The proper study of mankind is man.

Man always dies before he is fully born.

The world may be driven by the same ancient impulses. We will continue to see human struggles and successes. We will witness human glory and tragedies.

I still see life entirely through its Darwinian prism. I keep trying to shake off the aftereffects of writing 'The Thing About Life Is That One Day You'll Be Dead', and I find I can't.