21+ Maurice Blanchot Quotes On Education, Friendship And Socialism

Maurice Blanchot was a French writer, literary theorist, and philosopher. He was a major figure in post-structuralist thought, and his work had a significant influence on contemporary philosophy, literature, and politics. Blanchot is best known for his works The Space of Literature and The Unavowable Community, which explore the relationship between literature, language, and political power. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Maurice Blanchot on education, love, friendship.

Top 10 Maurice Blanchot Quotes

1. Lovers of painting and lovers of music are people who openly display their preference like a delectable ailment that isolates them and makes them proud.
2. A writer never reads his work. For him, it is the unreadable, a secret, and he cannot remain face to face with it. A secret, because he is separated from it.
3. The disaster ruins everything, all the while leaving everything intact.
4. The disaster... is what escapes the very possibility of experience—it is the limit of writing. This must be repeated: the disaster de-scribes.
5. A story? No. No stories, never again.
6. But my silence is real. If I hid it from you, you would find it again a little farther on.
7. If nothing were substituted for everything, it would still be too much and too little.
8. To see was terrifying, and to stop seeing tore me apart from my forehead to my throat.
9. Weak thoughts, weak desires: he felt their force.
10. Express only that which cannot be expressed. Leave it unexpressed)

Maurice Blanchot Famous Quotes And Sayings

I wanted to see something in full daylight; I was sated with the pleasure and comfort of the half light; I had the same desire for the daylight as for water and air. And if seeing was fire, I required the plenitude of fire, and if seeing would infect me with madness, I madly wanted that madness. — Maurice Blanchot

To write is to make oneself the echo of what cannot cease speaking -- and since it cannot, in order to become its echo I have, in a way, to silence it. I bring to this incessant speech the decisiveness, the authority of my own silence. — Maurice Blanchot

What if what has been said one time not only does not cease to be said but always recommences, and not only recommences but also imposes upon us the idea that nothing has ever truly begun, having from the beginning begun by beginning again. — Maurice Blanchot

We can never put enough distance between ourselves and what we love. To think that God is, is still to think of him as present; this is a thought according to our measure, destined only to console us. It is much more fitting to think that God is not, just as we must love him purely enough that we could be indifferent to the fact that he should not be. It is for this reason that the atheist is closer to God than the believer. — Maurice Blanchot

A writer who writes, I am alone... can be considered rather comical. It is comical for a man to recognize his solitude by addressing a reader and by using methods that prevent the individual from being alone. The word alone is just as general as the word bread. To pronounce it is to summon to oneself the presence of everything the word excludes. — Maurice Blanchot

Literature professes to be important while at the same time considering itself an object of doubt. It confirms itself as it disparages itself. It seeks itself: this is more than it has a right to do, because literature may be one of those things which deserve to be found but not to be sought. — Maurice Blanchot

Every artist is linked to a mistake with which he has a particular intimate relation. There is the mistake of Homer, of Shakespeare — which is perhaps, for both, the fact of not existing. Every art draws its origin from an exceptional fault, every work is the implementation of this original fault, from which come to us a new light and a risky conception of plenitude. — Maurice Blanchot

The less manifest the work, the stronger: as though a secret law demanded it always be hidden in what it shows, thus showing what must remain hidden, only showing it, in the end, by dissimulation. — Maurice Blanchot

I lean over you, your equal, offering you a mirror for your perfect nothingness, for your shadows which are neither light nor absence of light, for this void which contemplates. To all that which you are, and, for our language, are not, I add a consciousness. I make you experience your supreme identity as a relationship, I name you and define you. You become a delicious passivity. — Maurice Blanchot

The Journal is not essentially a confession, a story about oneself. It is a Memorial. What does the writer have to remember? Himself, who he is when he is not writing, when he is living his daily life, when he is alive and real, and not dying and without truth. — Maurice Blanchot

There is between sleep and us something like a pact, a treaty with no secret clauses, and according to this convention it is agreed that, far from being a dangerous, bewitching force, sleep will become domesticated and serve as an instrument of our power to act. We surrender to sleep, but in the way that the master entrusts himself to the slave who serves him. — Maurice Blanchot

Life Lessons by Maurice Blanchot

1. Maurice Blanchot's work emphasizes the importance of questioning existing norms and conventions, and encourages readers to think critically about their own beliefs.
2. His writing often explores the concept of the 'limit experience', which is a moment of intense self-reflection and awareness that can lead to personal transformation.
3. Blanchot's works also emphasize the importance of solitude and contemplation, and suggest that it is in these moments of stillness and introspection that we can find true meaning and purpose.