Satprem and Malraux

A Dialogue through Quotes

Humanity was thick and heavy, heavy with flesh, blood, suffering, eternally stuck to itself like everything that dies.

- Malraux 

A memory of an indelible pain is engraved in the tongue of the race, it was the first word of the world and the last one with a few songs in between in order to forget.

- Satprem

*

Under the sun of Asia, in the European night, in every corner of the world, men were dying, appalled by the frustration of their lives, and full of rancor for their fellows who would see another dawn  -  and nearly all of them were seeking consolation from their gods. Ah, if only they existed, those gods of theirs, and he might, even at the cost of never-ending torment, howl in their faces, like the baying dogs, the bitter truth  -  that no hope of heaven, no promise of reward, nothing can justify the end of any human life! Could he but circumvent the sheer futility of shouting his resentment at the bright indifference of the sun, the closed eyes of the dying man, those blood-stained teeth gnawing the tattered lips . . . and see no more that tortured face, the spectacle of that immense defeat!

- Malraux 

We do not believe in death; death is the falsehood of the world. We are going to shatter the myth of death. 

Suffering is a falsehood, death is a falsehood, pain and pettiness are falsehoods, and until the end, even if I perish, even if I fall, I shall repeat like a mad king: we are truth, we are light, we are greatness and beauty, the joy which sings, because we are divine.

- Satprem

*

Man becomes truly Man only when in quest of what is most exalted in him....

- Malraux

Man is yet to be, he is to be discovered and to become in these very cells, laid bare and stripped of all their genetic and atavistic and medical clutter.

"Become the human being," the Vedic Rishis had already said some ten thousand years ago.

- Satprem

*

To understand what the outside of an aquarium looks like, it's better not to be a fish. 

- Malraux

We are at the end of everything: just as the tadpole, one day, reaches the end of its fishbowl  -  and it does not know that it will become a frog, it does not even know what a frog is. Our terrestrial fishbowl is cracking. 

- Satprem

*

"Sometimes one is seized by the anguish of being nothing more than a man."

- Malraux

Suffocation is the first step to finding the door. Anguish is stupid in itself, but it is the false image or mental transcription of a physiological state necessary to reach the solution.

- Satprem

*

Suffering, I'd rather reduce it than account for it. I don't like humanity that is made up of contemplating suffering.

- Malraux

We are constantly in search of millions of remedies for one Disease we do not really want to cure: UNCONSCIOUSNESS.

- Satprem 

*

Death exists as the irrefutable proof of the absurdity of life.

- Malraux

In the end, there are graves. Always more graves. ..Revolutions as well as men are engulfed in the mortal tide. 

There is no MESSAGE, except to change our skin, our physiology and produce another being on earth that will reverse the conditions of evolution. 

- Satprem

*

Art is weak in the face of suffering; unfortunately, no painting can stand up against a pool of blood. 

- Malraux

Turn everything into fire and a more desperate determination to get out of this inconsolable system. 

We are ALL in a certain intimate rot that we must have the courage to get out from. 

- Satprem