Mimesis Quotes

“El mejor modo de castigar a los humanos, es dándoles lo que tanto reclaman.”
― René Girard, Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World

“Imitation is natural to man from childhood, one of his advantages over the lower animals being this, that he is the most imitative creature in the world, and learns at first by imitation.”
― Aristotle, Poetics

“Literature matters because it is how humanity, with all its losses and joys, can become a work of art.”
― Lisa C. Taylor

“Jeste li primijetili sa kakvom ravnodušnošću svijet ispraća naše velike, naše životne odluke? Kada sahranjujete oca, u naručje uzimate dijete, kada prosite ženu ili je posmatrate kako zauvijek nestaje u dnu ulice, nikada neće prhnuti ptice, neće se čuti zvonik crkve, neće čak pasti ni jebena kiša. Surova priroda učiniće sve da vas ubijedi u nebitnost vađe sudbonosne odluke.”
― Andrej Nikolaidis

“You claimed that... I would embroil those same carefully and colorfully constructed barrow-pushers and counts and wagoners and cutpurses in perfectly preposterous actions, during the course of which each would declare with great eloquence things that no count or cutpurse would ever possibly say. And if any ever even thought that he or she felt such things, you maintained, it was only from having been taken in by our skits in the first place.”
― Samuel R. Delany, Flight from Nevèrÿon

“The voices I give, however decorated with observations and interpretations of the other, are, nevertheless and certainly, very much my own.

But they do not speak for the other--and therefore speak falsely.

They speak rather to the other: the other in me, the other in you, the other in my other friend--assuming he would not finally and for the first time turn at this particular outrage to the real we call "his story" and laugh with undisguised derision at my preposterous fancy with no relation at all to his life, his madness, his city--instead of giving out with his usual applause. They speak against the other. They speak always in dialogue with, in contrast to, in protest of the real. They are always calling out to the other across the bridge on whose wild span madness and desire endlessly trade places, creating a wilderness at their center as palpably dangerous as that observed at any ill-mapped border. The monologue of art must be reinterpreted as the many-voiced argument of the artist with life, with life's images--indeed, as the wrangle between the articulate and everything else, with desire never fully possessed by any party, but endlessly at play between.”
― Samuel R. Delany, Flight from Nevèrÿon

“Nature creates similarities. One need only think of mimicry. The highest capacity for producing similarities, however, is man’s. His gift in seeing resemblances is nothing other than a rudiment of the powerful compulsion in former times to become and behave like something else. Perhaps there is none of his higher functions in which his memetic faculty does not play a decisive role.”
― Walter Benjamin, One Way Street And Other Writings

“As every barrier to the constraint of individualism is removed - as 'I' and 'my' appear in the names of more and more software applications and IT products - nevertheless today's rampant mimeticism ensures that 'I' and 'my' become less and less differentiated from 'you' and 'yours'...We crave differentiation, and deprived of it we blame the failing institutions that once might have delivered it.”
― Scott Cowdell, René Girard and Secular Modernity: Christ, Culture, and Crisis

“Why is society crumbling, collapsing, as it surely is?

One of the fundamental reasons is that the individual – you – has ceased to be creative.

I will explain what I mean. You & I have become imitative, we are copying, outwardly and inwardly. Outwardly, when learning a technique, when communicating with each other on the verbal level, naturally there must be some imitation, copy. I copy words. To become an engineer, I must first learn the technique, then use the technique to build a bridge.

There must be a certain amount of imitation, copying, in outward technique, but when there is inward, psychological imitation, surely we cease to be creative.

Our education, our social structure, our so-called religious life, are all based on imitation; that is, I fit into a particular social or religious formula. I have ceased to be a real individual; psychologically, I have become a mere repetitive machine with certain conditioned responses, whether of the Hindu, the Christian, the Buddhist, the German, or the Englishman.

Our responses are conditioned according to the pattern of society, whether it is Eastern or Western, religious or materialistic. So one of the fundamental causes of the disintegration of society is imitation, and one of the disintegrating factors is the leader, whose very essence is imitation.”
― Jiddu Krishnamurti, On Right Livelihood

“Jesus reproaches the Pharisees for an older version of the same ploy when he sees them build tombs for the prophets their fathers killed. The spectacular demonstrations of piety toward the victims of our predecessors frequently conceal a wish to justify ourselves at their expense. If we had lived in the time of our fathers, the Pharisees say, we would not have joined them in spilling the blood of the prophets. The children repeat the crimes of their fathers precisely because they believe they are morally superior
to them. This false difference is already the mimetic illusion of modern individualism, which represents the greatest resistance to the mimetic truth that is reenacted again and again in human relations. The paradox is that the resistance itself brings about the reenactment.”
― René Girard, I See Satan Fall Like Lightning