René Daumal

Author profile

born

March 16, 1908 in Boulzicourt, France

died

May 21, 1944

gender

male

genre

Literature & Fiction, Poetry

About this author

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René Daumal was a French spiritual surrealist writer and poet. He was born in Boulzicourt, Ardennes, France.

In his late teens his avant-garde poetry was published in France's leading journals, and in his early twenties, although courted by André Breton co-founded, as a counter to Surrealism and Dada, a literary journal, "Le Grand Jeu" with three friends, collectively known as the Simplists, including poet Roger Gilbert-Lecomte . He is known best in the U.S. for two novels A Night of Serious Drinking and the allegorical novel Mount Analogue: A Novel of Symbolically Authentic Non-Euclidean Adventures in Mountain Climbing both based upon his friendship with Alexander de Salzmann, a pupil of G. I. Gurdjieff.

Daumal was self-taught in the Sanskri...more

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Books by René Daumal

Average rating: 4.19 · 526 ratings · 71 reviews · 18 distinct works

	Mount Analogue 4.22 avg rating — 273 ratings — published 1952 — 9 editions	My rating:
	A Night of Serious Drinking 4.11 avg rating — 157 ratings — published 1979 — 6 editions	My rating:
	The Powers of the Word: Selected Essays and Notes, 1927-1943 by René Daumal, Mark Polizzotti (Translation) 4.16 avg rating — 25 ratings — published 1988	My rating:
	Le Contre-Ciel by René Daumal, Kelton W. Knight (Translation) 4.30 avg rating — 20 ratings — 3 editions	My rating:
	You've Always Been Wrong by René Daumal, Thomas Vosteen (Translator) 3.60 avg rating — 15 ratings — published 1995	My rating:
	A Fundamental Experiment by René Daumal, Roger Shattuck (Translator) 4.60 avg rating — 10 ratings — published 1987	My rating:
	Rasa, Or, Knowledge of the Self: Essays on Indian Aesthetics and Selected Sanskrit Studies by René Daumal, Louise L. Levi (Translator) 4.33 avg rating — 12 ratings — published 1982 — 3 editions	My rating:
	Pataphysical Essays by René Daumal, Thomas Vosteen (Translator) 5.00 avg rating — 2 ratings — published 2012	My rating:
	Correspondance 5.00 avg rating — 2 ratings — published 1992 — 2 editions	My rating:
	The Lie of the Truth: And Other Parables from the Way of Liberation by René Daumal, Philip Powrie 4.00 avg rating — 2 ratings — published 1989	My rating:

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Quotes by René Daumal

“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.”
― René Daumal

tags: inspirational

31 people liked it

“Philosophy teaches how man thinks he thinks; but drinking shows how he really thinks.”
― René Daumal, A Night of Serious Drinking

6 people liked it

“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

tags: language

2 people liked it

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René Daumal

Author profile

combine editionsBooks by René Daumal

Quotes by René Daumal

combine editions
Books by René Daumal