Raoul Vaneigem Quotes

We participate, without feeling it's significance, to a battle of the free life against the profitable agony.
This battle is not lead the way military do. It never expects neither victory nor defeat, it does not rely on tactics, it mobilizes nor brute force nor the ruse. It is not based on any project, nor any action plan.
It is a battle on between a decay of all things, a weariness of the people that convinced them to die, and the permanent revival of a life that will never give up, permanently claims rights, and progresses through its quiet determination to ignore the obstacles.

People are bewitched into believing that time slips away, and this belief is the basis of time actually slipping away.

There are more truths in twenty-four hours of a man's life than in all the philosophies.

What drives us to despair is not the immensity of our unsatisfied desires, but the moment when our fledgling passion discovers its own emptiness. Insatiable desire for passionate knowledge of one pretty girl after another stems from anxiety and from fear of love, so afraid are we of never encountering anything but objects. The dawn when lovers leave each other's arms is the same dawn that breaks on the execution of revolutionaries without a revolution. Isolation a deux cannot prevail over the isolation of all. Pleasure is broken off prematurely and lovers find themselves naked in the world, their actions suddenly ridiculous and feeble. No love is possible in an unhappy world.

The key is within each of us. No instructions come with it.

Each component of the organism, like the individual in the social body, possesses the capacity for enjoyment of the self through sharing with others.

Daydreaming subverts the world.

As poverty has been reduced in terms of mere survival, it has become more profound in terms of our way of life.

The same people who are murdered slowly in the mechanized slaughterhouses of work are also arguing, singing, drinking, dancing, making love, holding the streets, picking up weapons and inventing a new poetry.

People without imagination are beginning to tire of the importance attached to comfort, to culture, to leisure, to all that destroys imagination. This means that people are not really tired of comfort, culture and leisure, but of the use to which they are.

In an industrial society which confuses work and productivity, the necessity of producing has always been an enemy of the desire to create.

The history of our times calls to mind those Walt Disney characters who rush madly over the edge of a cliff without seeing it, so that the power of their imagination keeps them suspended in mid-air; but as soon as they look down and see where they are, they fall.

What could I wish for the present but to take the greatest pleasure in being what I am?

It is much more a lack of fun which batters us than over abundance and indulgence

To be rich nowadays merely means to possess a large number of poor objects.

Never before has a civilization reached such a degree of a contempt for life; never before has a generation, drowned in mortification, felt such a rage to live.

Ideally a book would have no order in it, and the reader would have to discover his own.

Because of its increasing triviality, everyday life has gradually become our central preoccupation

The world of the commodity is a world upside-down, which bases itself not upon life but upon the transformation of life into work.

People who talk about revolution and class struggle without referring explicitly to everyday life, without understanding what is subversive about love and what is positive in the refusal of constraints, such people have a corpse in their mouth

Daily life is governed by an economic system in which the production and consumption of insults tends to balance out.

No more Guernicas, no more Auschwitzes, no more Hiroshimas, no more Setifs. Hooray! But what about the impossibility of living, what about this stifling mediocrity and this absence of passion? What about the jealous fury in which the rankling of never being ourselves drives us to imagine that other people are happy? What about this feeling of never really being inside your own skin?

Suffering is the pain of constraints. An atom of pure delight, no matter how small, can hold it at bay.

In the twentieth century, death terrifies men less than the absence of real life.

Our task is not to rediscover nature but to remake it.

Down with a world in which the guarantee that we will not die of starvation has been purchased with the guarantee that we will die of boredom.

My creativity, no matter how poor, is for me a far better guide than all the knowledge with which my head has been crammed. In the night of Power, its glimmer keeps the enemy forces at bay.

Privative appropriation and domination are thus originally imposed and felt as a positive right, but in the form of a negative universality. Valid for everyone, justified in everyone's eyes by divine or natural law, the right of privative appropriation is objectified in a general illusion, in a universal transcendence, in an essential law under which everyone individually manages to tolerate the more or less narrow limits assigned to his right to live and to the conditions of life in general.

Production and consumption are the nipples of modern society. Thus suckled, humanity grows in strength and beauty; rising standard of living, all modern conveniences, distractions of all kinds, culture for all, the comfort of your dreams.

I do not dream of a gentle revolution. My passion runs to the violence of supersession, the ferocity of a life that renounces nothing.

The eruption of lived pleasure is such that in losing myself I find myself; forgetting that I exist, I realize myself.

The work of art of the future will be the construction of a passionate life.

Poetry seldom occurs in poems. Poetry only occurs when words cause action.

We can escape the commonplace only by manipulating it, controlling it, thrusting it into our dreams or surrendering it to the free play of our subjectivity.