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.

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.

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.

You can only predict things after they have happened.

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

The critic should describe, and not prescribe.

Living is abnormal.

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

Everything that has been will be, everything that will be is, everything that will be has been.

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.

I've always been suspicious of collective truths.

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

A nose that can see is worth two that sniff.

A civil servant doesn't make jokes.

We have not the time to take our time.

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

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

Like all revolutions, the surrealist revolution was a reversion, a restitution, an expression of vital and indispensable spiritual needs.

Ideologies separate us. Dreams and anguish bring us together.

All theatre is absurd.

Culture cannot be separated from politics. The arts, philosophy and metaphysics, religion and the sciences, constitute culture. Politics are the science or art of organizing our relationships to allow for the development of life in society.

Cut off from his religious, metaphysical and transcendental roots, man is lost; all his actions become senseless, absurd, useless.

I have the vanity to think that every play I have written is different from the previous ones. Yet, even though they are written in a different way, they all deal with the same themes, the same preoccupations. 'Exit the King' is also 'The Bald Soprano.'

I was born near Bucharest, but my parents came to France a year later. We moved back to Romania when I was thirteen, and my world was shattered. I hated Bucharest, its society, and its mores - its anti-Semitism for example.

Perhaps I abandoned criticism because I am full of contradictions, and when you write an essay, you are not supposed to contradict yourself. But in the theater, by inventing various characters, you can. My characters are contradictory not only in their language but in their behavior as well.

When I was nine, the teacher asked us to write a piece about our village fete. He read mine in class. I was encouraged and continued. I even wanted to write my memoirs at the age of ten. At twelve I wrote poetry, mostly about friendship - 'Ode to Friendship.' Then my class wanted to make a film, and one little boy suggested that I write the script.

Woe betide the man who refuses to conform.

Boredom flourishes too when you feel safe. Its a symptom of security.

Describe a circle stroke its back and it turns vicious.

Every message of despair is the statement of a situation from which everybody must freely try to find a way out.

A civil servant doesn't make jokes.

We have witnessed the terrible increases in the incidence of alcoholism, the advent of drug dependency, the protests, marches, strikes and human alienation.

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.

Without alienation, there can be no politics.

Thus in Christianity the alienation had become total, and it was this total alienation that was the biggest obstacle to the progress of self-consciousness.

I worked with my son when he was much younger; we did L.A. Law together, where I played his father and he played a kid who was suing his father for alienation of affection or something. It was great.

When you stop to think about it, so many films today where we don't have that kind of contact are films about alienation. About alienated feelings. We are much more alienated from our colleagues nowadays.

I think the degree of alienation and despair is more universal.

Young alienation, disappointment and heartache is all a part of the first real growing up that we do.

The historical experience of socialist countries has sadly demonstrated that collectivism does not do away with alienation but rather increases it, adding to it a lack of basic necessities and economic inefficiency.

You can't put abandonment and alienation under arrest.

Marks of Identity is, among other things, the expression of the process of alienation in a contemporary intellectual with respect to his own country.

Family traditions counter alienation and confusion. They help us define who we are; they provide something steady, reliable and safe in a confusing world.

Clinton feels a profound alienation from the Washington culture here, and I happen to agree with him.

Alienation as our present destiny is achieved only by outrageous violence perpetrated by human beings on human beings.

Black people should have recognition for themselves and their backgrounds and their relationships with other people in the world and thus lose some of their alienation. This museum has certainly stood for that in this town.

Another cause for the increase in alienation and cynicism is a feeling that too many policy decisions that affect individuals have been taken out of any system that has accountability or that they can influence.

There is only one way left to escape the alienation of present day society: to retreat ahead of it.

I don't want to express alienation. It isn't what I feel. I'm interested in various kinds of passionate engagement. All my work says be serious, be passionate, wake up.