Success Quote by Rene Daumal

Daumal isn’t defending plain language; he’s demanding disciplined language. Clarity and content, he implies, are the bare minimum - the kind of well-made sentence that can still be morally idle. What he wants is teleology: speech that knows what it is for. A “goal and an imperative” turns language from description into action, from aesthetic object into ethical instrument. Without that inner command, even articulate speech decays into noise, a slippery slope rendered with almost comic inevitability: chatter, babble, confusion. The escalation isn’t just rhetorical flair; it’s a diagnosis of how meaning erodes when words circulate without stakes.

The subtext is a suspicion of modern talk - salon cleverness, political slogans, spiritual platitudes, the comforting illusion that saying something equals doing something. Daumal, writing in an era of propaganda, mass media, and ideological capture, treats language as a contested territory. Words can clarify reality, but they can also anesthetize it; they can simulate purpose while evacuating responsibility. His imperative isn’t a call for authoritarian command so much as a plea for inner necessity: speak only when you can answer “to what end?”

The context matters: Daumal moved through Surrealist circles and later toward spiritual discipline, and you can feel both impulses here. The Surrealist distrust of bourgeois “chatter” meets an ascetic demand for intention. It’s a warning that communication isn’t automatically communion. Language becomes real only when it risks something: commitment, consequence, a willingness to be held to what you’ve said.