Rene Daumal Inspirational Quotes (9)

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

...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?

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.

Philosophy teaches how man thinks he thinks but drinking shows how he really thinks.