Roger Caillois famous quotes

Last updated: Sep 5, 2024

I see the origin of the irresistible attraction of metaphor and analogy, the explanation of our strange and permanent need to find similarities in things. I can scarcely refrain from suspecting some ancient, diffused magnetism; a call from the center of things; a dim, almost lost memory, or perhaps a presentiment, pointless in so puny a being, of a universal syntax.
-- Roger Caillois

#Memories #Needs #Syntax
I wonder, only in passing, whether the indelible ornamentation that man inscribes upon his own epidermis does not respond to a nostalgia for the universal internally generated coloring of corrollas, furs, shells, carapaces and wings. For man it has been necessary to create both works and tools outside of himself. But it may be that he retains an obscure nostalgia to create them on his own body, to make them a part of it rather than projecting them outwards onto an independent surface, where he is free to retouch them as he sees fit, which is precisely what painting and art are.
-- Roger Caillois

#Art #Independent #Men
We must train ourselves in courage and generosity.
-- Roger Caillois

#Generosity #Train
In strongly opposing the world of play to that of reality, and in stressing that play is essentially a side activity, the interference is drawn that any contamination by ordinary life runs the risk of corrupting and destroying its very nature.
-- Roger Caillois

#Running #Stress #Reality
The fantastic is always a break in the acknowledged order, an irruption of the inadmissible within the changeless everyday legality
-- Roger Caillois

#Order #Everyday #Fantastic
Clausius and Darwin cannot both be right.
-- Roger Caillois
Dreams are deformed reflections of ourselves - less stable and more ungraspable than we are, upon which we in our turn assume the right to reflect upon and to determine.
-- Roger Caillois

#Dream #Reflection #Assuming
Life appears: a complex dampness, destined to an intricate future and charged with secret virtues, capable of challenge and creation. A kind of precarious slime, of surface mildew, in which a ferment is already working. A turbulent, spasmodic sap, a presage and expectation of a new way of being, breaking with mineral perpetuity and boldly exchanging it for the doubtful privilege of being able to tremble, decay, and multiply.
-- Roger Caillois

#Expectations #Challenges #Secret

What is the subject matter of this apparently very personal world? It has been suggested that these shapes and images are underworld characters, the inhabitants of the vast common realm of memories that have gone down below the level of conscious control. It may be they are. The degree of emotional involvement and the amount of free association with the material being photographed would point in that direction.
I want to have the memories of my time with you to keep me warm.
Growing up in Poland, I didn't have the experience of going to Disneyland as a child, so I don't have any childhood memories connected to it, good or bad.
Aggressive Christianity is the world's greatest need.
A diary need not be a dreary chronicle of one's movements; it should aim rather at giving salient account of some particular episode, a walk, a book, a conversation.
Find a need and fill it. Successful businesses are founded on the needs of people.
Remember you love writing.Â It wouldnâ€™t be worth it if you didnâ€™t.Â If the love fades, do what you need to and get it back,
Opportunity lives at the intersection of what people need tomorrow and can be just barely built today.
You don't need vision to be a visionary.
Most students of literature can pick apart a metaphor or spot an ethnic stereotype, but not many of them can say things like: 'The poem's sardonic tone is curiously at odds with its plodding syntax.

Roger Caillois famous quotes

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