Daumal Quotes

#1. You cannot stay on the summit forever; you have to come down again. So why bother in the first place? Just this: What is above knows what is below, but what is below does not know what is above. One climbs, one sees. One descends, one sees no longer, but one has seen. There is an art of conducting oneself in the lower regions by the memory of what one saw higher up. When one can no longer see, one can at least still know. #Quote by Rene Daumal

#2. I'm very much aware I can't think. I'm a poet. #Quote by Rene Daumal

#3. A knife is neither true nor false, but anyone impaled on its blade is in error. #Quote by Rene Daumal

#4. And then you grew up, went to school, and began to 'philosophize,' didn't you? We all go through the same thing. It seems that during adolescence a person's inner life is suddenly weakened, stripped of its natural courage. In his thinking he no longer dares stand face to face with reality or mystery; he begins to see them through the opinions of 'grown-ups,' through books and courses and professors. Still, a voice remains which is not completely muffled and which cries out every so often - every time its gag is loosened by an unexpected jolt in the routine. The voice cries out its great questioning of everything, but we stifle it again right away. #Quote by Rene Daumal

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

#6. 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? #Quote by Rene Daumal

#7. Out of a single man, they get a thousand: homo economicus, homo politicus, homo physico-chimicus, homo endocrinus, homo skeletonicus, homo emotions, homo percipiens, homo libidinosus, homo peregrinans, homo ridens, homo ratiocinans, homo artifex, homo aestbeticus, homo religiosus, homo sapiens, homo historicus, homo ethnographicus, and many, many more. But at the very end of the production line in this laboratory of mine sits a Scienter who is quite unique. Three thousand brains in one. His function is to collect all the data and clarifications written up by the specialist Scienters. When he has collated everything, he is convinced that he has clasped the red rabbit or the essential man entire to his understanding. There you are, you can see him from here,' he ended, with a sign to one of his assistants who brought me a pair of binoculars.

I put them to my eyes and, indeed, at the far end of the gallery, I saw the Omniscienter. There he was, an enormous cranial dome with a tiny, shapeless, crumpled face, which seemed to me to be hanging by the ears from the two ebony knobs on the back of a raised throne. Swinging to and fro beneath this head was a little cloth puppet which dangled its empty trouser legs over the crimson plush seat. His tiny right arm was kept aloft by means of a wire, and the index finger rested on his temple in the gesture of one who knows. Above the throne ran a banner bearing this inscription:

I KNOW EVERYTHING, BUT I DON'T UNDERSTA #Quote by Rene Daumal

#8. Everyone pretended to understand so as not to interrupt. #Quote by Rene Daumal

#9. If, on the way back from the Passage des Patriarches to my apartment near Saint-Germain-des-Prés, I had thought of examining myself like a transparent foreign body, I should have discovered one of the laws which governs the behavior of "featherless bipeds unequipped to conceive the number pi" - Father Sogol's definition of the species to which he, you, and I belong. This law might be termed: inner resonance to influences nearest at hand. The guides on Mount Analogue, who explained it to me later, called it simply the chameleon law. Father Sogol had really convinced me, and while he was talking to me, I was prepared to follow him in his crazy expedition. But as I neared home, where I could again find all my old habits, I imagined my colleagues at the office, the writers I knew, and my best friends listening to an account of the conversation I had just had. I could imagine their sarcasm, their skepticism, and their pity. I began to suspect myself of naiveté and credulity, so much so that when I tried to tell my wife about meeting Father Sogol, I caught myself using expressions like "a funny old fellow," "an unfrocked monk," "a slightly daffy inventor," "a crazy idea. #Quote by Rene Daumal

#10. Philosophy teaches how man thinks he thinks; but drinking shows how he really thinks. #Quote by Rene Daumal

#11. 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 ... #Quote by Rene Daumal

#12. The cock crowing in the milky dawn thinks its call raises the sun; the child howling in a closed room thinks its cries open the door. But the sun and the mother go their own way, following the laws of their beings. Those who see us, even though we cannot see ourselves, opened the door for us, answering our puerile calculations, our unsteady desires, and our awkward efforts with a generous welcome. #Quote by Rene Daumal

#13. 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. #Quote by Rene Daumal

#14. 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 ... #Quote by Rene Daumal

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

#16. 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. #Quote by Rene Daumal

#17. 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? #Quote by Rene Daumal

#18. Art is here taken to mean knowledge realized in action. #Quote by Rene Daumal

#19. Having no lead to follow, we were swept up by words, memories, manias, grudges, and solidarities. Having no goal to aim for, we wasted what little life there was in our thoughts on joining in with a pun, speaking ill of common acquaintances, avoiding unpleasant facts, riding hobbyhorses, pushing at open doors, making faces, and preening ourselves. #Quote by Rene Daumal

#20. I am dead because I lack desire,
I lack desire because I think I possess.
I think I possess because I do not try to give.
In trying to give, you see that you have nothing;Seeing that you have nothing, you try to give of yourself;
Trying to give of yourself, you see that you are nothing:Seeing that you are nothing, you desire to become;
In desiring to become, you begin to live. #Quote by Rene Daumal

#21. 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! #Quote by Rene Daumal

#22. 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*. #Quote by Rene Daumal

#23. I am dead because I have no desire,
I have no desire because I think I possess,
I think I possess because I do not try to give;
Trying to give, I see that I have nothing,
Seeing that I have nothing, I try to give myself,
Trying to give myself, I see that I am nothing,
Seeing that I am nothing, I desire to become,
Desiring to become, I live. #Quote by Rene Daumal

#24. In somber mood, I re-called my whole life up to this day, and my head spun with the buzzing of a hundred and one ouroboristic worms. I remembered the drinking parties that made us thirsty and the thirst that made us drink; I thought back to Sidonius recounting his endless dream; to the people who worked to be able to eat and who ate to have the strength to work; to the black thoughts I drowned with such sadness in the cask and which were reborn in different hues. Between the vicious circles of the drinking party and those of the delusory paradises, I would never again be able to choose, I could no longer be part of their revolutions, I was from that moment no more than a wasteland. #Quote by Rene Daumal

#25. 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. #Quote by Rene Daumal

#26. The path of greatest desires often lies ... through the undesirable. #Quote by Rene Daumal

#27. Shoes, unlike feet, are not something you're born with. So you can choose what you want. At first be guided in your choice by people with experience, later by your own experience. Before long you will become so accustomed to your shoes that every nail will be like a finger to feel out the rock and cling to it. They will become a sensitive and dependable instrument, like a part of yourself. And yet, you're not born with them; when they're worn out, you'll throw them away and still remain what you are. #Quote by Rene Daumal

#28. 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? #Quote by Rene Daumal

#29. 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. #Quote by Rene Daumal

#30. 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. #Quote by Rene Daumal

#31. At that point [Father Sogol] gave me a roguish and forceful look demanding my complicity in this adroit falsehood. For naturally everyone was still in the dark. But by this simple ruse each person had the impression of belonging to a minority, of being among "one or two not yet informed," felt himself surrounded by a convinced majority, and was eager to be quickly convinced himself. This simple method of Sogol's for "getting the audience into the palm of his hand," as he phrased it, was a simple application of the mathematical method that consists in "considering the problem as solved." And he also used the chemical analogy of a "chain reaction." But if this use was employed in the service of truth, could one still call it falsehood? In any case everyone pricked up his ears. #Quote by Rene Daumal

#32. The door to the invisible must be visible. #Quote by Rene Daumal

#33. In the mythic tradition, the Mountain is the bond between Earth and Sky. Its solitary summit reaches the sphere of eternity, and its base spreads out in manifold foothills into the world of mortals. It is the way by which man can raise himself to the divine and by which the divine can reveal itself to man. #Quote by Rene Daumal

#34. If I were to tell this story the way history is usually written or the way each of us recalls his own past, which means recording only the most glorious moments and inventing a new continuity for them, I should omit these little details and say that our eight stout hearts drummed from morning to night in time with a single all-encompassing desire - or some such lie. But the flame that kindles desire and illuminates thought never burned for more than a few seconds at a stretch. The rest of the time we tried to remember it.
Fortunately the demands of daily work, in which each of us had his vital role, reminded us that we had come aboard of our own free will, that we were indispensable to one another, and that we were on a ship - that is to say, in a temporary habitation, designed to transport us somewhere else. If anyone forgot it, someone else lost no time in reminding him. #Quote by Rene Daumal

#35. It is dangerous to preach humility to feeble souls. This distances them even more from themselves. Someone who is rigid, and turned inwards, can become aware of his destiny only by rebelling. #Quote by Rene Daumal

#36. 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. #Quote by Rene Daumal

#37. I've got a couple of other ideas. For instance, about the viscosity of sound. Sounds spread over surfaces, slide across polished floors, flow in gutters, pile up in corners, snap on ridges, fall like rain on mucous membranes, swarm on plexuses, flame up on body hair, and flutter on skin like warm air over summer fields. There are aerial battles where sound waves bounce back on themselves, start spinning and whirl between heaven and earth, like the indestructible regret of the suicide, who halfway down from the sixth floor all of a sudden no longer wants to die any more. There are words which do not reach their mark and roll up into roving balls, swollen with danger, like lightning does sometimes when it fails to find its target. There are words which freeze... #Quote by Rene Daumal

#38. He questioned us one after the other. Each one of his questions - all of them very simple: Who were we? Why had we come? - caught us completely off our guard and seemed to probe our very insides. Who are you? Who am I? We could not answer him as we could a police official or a customs inspector. Give one's name and profession? What does that mean? But *who* are you? And *what* are you? The words we uttered - we had none better - were worthless, repugnant and grotesque as dead things. We realized that with the guides of Mount Analogue, we could no longer get away with just words. #Quote by Rene Daumal