Rene Daumal Quotes

#1. Philosophy teaches how man thinks he thinks; but drinking shows how he really thinks.

Rene Daumal

#2. I'm very much aware I can't think. I'm a poet.

Rene Daumal

#3. However, since they were completely ignorant of the laws of the place, they were caught in a whirlpool. Condemned to turn round and round in slow circles, they could still bombard the coast, but all their shells came back at them like boomerangs. It was a ludicrous fate.

Rene Daumal

#4. The odor of literature as a stopgap, of words piled one upon the other to avoid taking action or to console oneself for being incapable of it.

Rene Daumal

#5. To return to the source of things, one has to travel in the opposite direction.

Rene Daumal

#6. All the means we've been given to stay alert we use to ornament our sleep. If instead of endlessly inventing new ways to make life more comfortable we'd apply our ingenuity to fabricating instruments to jog man out of his torpor!

Rene Daumal

#7. Eternity He who binds himself to a joy Does the winged life destroy But he who kisses the joy as it flies Lives in eternity's sun rise - WILLIAM BLAKE

Rene Daumal

#8. The most serious thing, and the strangest, is that we are afraid to the point of panic, not so much of seeing ourselves as of being seen by ourselves. This is our root absurdity. What is behind this great fear?

Rene Daumal

#9. I went for him, shook him by the shoulders with nothing better to shout at him but 'Why? Why?'
He answered me gravely, 'It's true. But you must begin to think of *how*.

Rene Daumal

#10. Everyone pretended to understand so as not to interrupt.

Rene Daumal

#11. Art is here taken to mean knowledge realized in action.

Rene Daumal

#12. When feet doesn't want to hold you, you climb with your head. Maybe it isn't the natural order of things, but isn't it better to walk with your head than to think with your feet, as it happens so frequently?

Rene Daumal

#13. Definition: Alpinism is the art of going through the mountains confronting the greatest dangers with the biggest of cares. What we call art here, is the application of a knowledge to an action.

Rene Daumal

#14. Words are made for a certain exactness of thought, as tears are for a certain degree of pain. What is least distinct cannot be named; what is clearest is unutterable.

Rene Daumal

#15. Common experience is the gold reserve which confers an exchange value on the currency which words are; without this reserve of shared experiences, all our pronouncements are checks drawn on insufficient funds.

Rene Daumal

#16. Never halt on a shifting slope. Even if you think you have a firm foothold ...

Rene Daumal

#17. It is still not enough for language to have clarity and content ... it must also have a goal and an imperative. Otherwise from language we descend to chatter, from chatter to babble, and from babble to confusion.

Rene Daumal

#18. A knife is neither true nor false, but anyone impaled on its blade is in error.

Rene Daumal

#19. Man is head, chest and stomach. Each of these animals operates, more often than not, individually. I eat, I feel, I even, although rarely, think. This jungle crawls and teems, is hungry, roars, gets angry, devours itself, and its cacophonic concert does not even stop when you are asleep.

Rene Daumal

#20. What did we possess of real value? ... For no one saw anything around him or in him which really belonged to him. It reached the point where we were just eight beggars, possessing nothing ...

Rene Daumal

#21. It is very tempting, when you talk about the events of the past, to impose clarity and order upon what had neither one nor the other.

Rene Daumal

#22. I think I possess because I do not try to give,
Trying to give, I see that I have nothing.

Rene Daumal

#23. I succeeded by following the same method, which consists in regarding the problem as solved and deducing from the solution all logical consequences.

Rene Daumal

#24. Truth is one, but error proliferates. Man tracks it down and cuts it up into little pieces hoping to turn it into grains of truth. But the ultimate atom will always essentially be an error, a miscalculation.

Rene Daumal

#25. It's not the end of it when you've drowned your black thoughts, because afterwards there are blue thoughts and red thoughts and yellow thoughts ...

Rene Daumal

#26. The man who would find his vegetal negative and unite with it would restore the integrity of the cosmos.

Rene Daumal

#27. The path of greatest desires often lies ... through the undesirable.

Rene Daumal

#28. This place has only three exits, sir: Madness, and Death.

Rene Daumal

#29. A man who makes a plate or a shirt or a loaf of bread or anything our great great ancestors called a work of art, has no need to try to be sincere; all he can do is practice his craft to the best of his ability. But once he starts making useless things, how can he not be sincere?

Rene Daumal

#30. The door to the invisible must be visible.

Rene Daumal

#31. Each time dawn appears, the mystery is there in its entirety.

Rene Daumal