It isn't what people think that is important, but the reason they think what they think.
Interpretation
The underlying reasons behind people's thoughts matter more than the thoughts themselves.
Eugene Ionesco's quote suggests that understanding the motivations and contexts behind a person's beliefs is more crucial than the beliefs themselves. This perspective invites deeper inquiry into human thought processes and encourages us to look beyond surface-level judgments, recognizing that personal experiences and societal influences shape opinions.
In practice
This quote can be used in a discussion about psychology and how people's backgrounds influence their opinions.
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.
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.
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.
Drama lies in extreme exaggeration of the feelings, an exaggeration that dislocates flat everyday reality.
Language should almost break up or explode in its fruitless effort to contain so many meanings.
The brightest light, the light of Italy, the purest sky of Scandinavia in the month of June is only a half-light when one compares it to the light of childhood. Even the nights were blue.
Where the soul is full of peace and joy, outward surrounding and circumstances are of comparatively little account.
I believe that we must maintain pride in the knowledge that the actions we take, based on our own decisions and choices as individuals, link directly to the magnificent challenge of transforming human history.
I pity the man who wants a coat so cheap that the man or woman who produces the cloth will starve in the process.
Our faith in freedom does not rest on the foreseeable results in particular circumstances, but on the belief that it will, on balance, release more forces for the good than for the bad ... Freedom granted only when it is known beforehand that its effects will be beneficial is not freedom.
Ninety-nine hundredths or, possibly, nine hundred and ninety-nine thousandths of our activity is purely automatic and habitual, from our rising in the morning to our lying down each night.
For those who have obtained unobstructed knowledge of Self, the world is seen merely as a bondage causing imagination.
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