René Daumal Quotes

15 Sourced Quotes

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.

René Daumal
Each time dawn appears, the mystery is there in its entirety.

René Daumal
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 cheques drawn on insufficient funds.

René Daumal
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.

René Daumal
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.

René Daumal
Philosophy teaches how man thinks he thinks; but drinking shows how he really thinks.

René Daumal
There is an art to finding your way in the lower regions by the memory of what you have seen when you were higher up. When you can no longer see, you can at least still know...

René Daumal
My observations are those of a beginner. As they are completely fresh in my mind and concern the first difficulties a beginner encounters, they may be more useful to beginners making their first ascents than treatises written by professionals. These are no doubt more methodical and complete, but are intelligible only after a little preliminary experience. The entire aim of these notes is to help the beginner acquire this preliminary experience a little faster.

René Daumal
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.

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

René Daumal
You cannot always stay on the summits. You have to come down again...

René Daumal
Art has a double face, of expression and illusion, just like science has a double face: the reality of error and the phantom of truth.

René Daumal
So what's the point? Only this: what is above knows what is below, what is below does not know what is above. While climbing, take note of all the difficulties along your path. During the descent, you will no longer see them, but you will know that they are there if you have observed carefully.

René Daumal
Alpinism is the art of climbing mountains by confronting the greatest dangers with the greatest prudence. Art is used here to mean the accomplishment of knowledge in action.

René Daumal
I know everything, but I don't understand any of it.

René Daumal