Whenever you observe an animal closely, you feel as if a human being sitting inside were making fun of you.

Elias Canetti, The Human Province

The great writers of aphorisms read as if they had all known each other very well.

Elias Canetti, The Human Province

There are books that one has for twenty years without reading them, that one always keeps at hand, that one takes along from city to city, from country to country, carefully packed, even when there is very little room, and perhaps one leafs through them while removing them from a trunk; yet one carefully refrains from reading even a complete sentence. Then, after twenty years, there comes a moment when suddenly, as though under a high compulsion, one cannot help taking in such a book from beginning to end, at one sitting: it is like a revelation. Now one knows why one made such a fuss about it. It had to be with one for a long time; it had to travel; it had to occupy space; it had to be a burden; and now it has reached the goal of its voyage, now it reveals itself, now it illuminates the twenty bygone years it mutely lived with one. It could not say so much if it had not been there mutely the whole time, and what idiot would dare to assert that the same things had always been in it.

Elias Canetti, The Human Province

There is no uncannier notion than that of the abandoned earth, abandoned by human beings. People tend to think they emigrate, if for no other reason than to take along their memory of the earth. They could never be as well off as here. Far reaching instruments would have to enable them to observe the world but without recognizing what they have lost, an inexhaustible homeland, and the false religion to which they have to ascribe this loss would already have been traded in, far too late, for another. One can assume that this new religion would be the right one; had it come in time, it would have saved the earth for mankind.

Elias Canetti, The Human Province

His dream: to know everything he knows and yet not know it.

Elias Canetti, The Human Province

How many objects did mankind have to produce to bring about a philosophy of materialism.

Elias Canetti, The Human Province

Music is the best solace if for no other reason than because it doesn’t make new words. Even when it is set to words, its own magic prevails and snuffs out the danger of the words. It is purest, however, when playing for itself. One believes it absolutely, for its assurance is one of the feelings. Its course is freer than anything else that seems humanly possible, and this freedom contains its redemption. The more densely populated the world and the more machine-like the formation of life, the more indispensable music has to become. There will come a time when music alone will provide a way of slipping through the tight meshes of functions; leaving music as a powerful and uninfluenced reservoir of freedom must be accounted the most important task of intellectual life in the future. Music is the truly living history of humanity, of which otherwise we would only have dead parts. . . .

Elias Canetti, The Human Province

Animals do not realize that we name them. Or else they do realize it, and that may be why they fear us.

Elias Canetti, The Human Province

He always knows in advance what the newspaper will say and that's why he has to pursue it thoroughly.

Elias Canetti, The Human Province

The novel should not be in any hurry. Once, hurry belonged to its sphere, now the film has taken that over; measured by the film, the hasty novel must always remain inadequate. The novel, as a creature of calmer times, may carry something of that old calm into our new hastiness. It could serve many people as slow-motion; it could induce them to tarry; it could replace the empty meditations of their cults.

Elias Canetti, The Human Province

Photography has destroyed the image.

Elias Canetti, The Human Province