Mmelbi > Mmelbi's Quotes

“These men are in prison: that is the Outsider’s verdict. They are quite contented in prison—caged animals who have never known freedom; but it is prison all the same. And the Outsider? He is in prison too: nearly every Outsider in this book has told us so in a different language; but he knows it. His desire is to escape. But a prison-break is not an easy matter; you must know all about your prison, otherwise you might spend years in tunnelling, like the Abbe in The Count of Monte Cristo, and only find yourself in the next cell.”
― Colin Wilson, The Outsider

“The great delusion of modernity, is that the laws of nature explain the universe for us. The laws of nature describe the universe, they describe the regularities. But they explain nothing.

[Es ist die große Täuschung der Moderne, dass die Naturgesetze uns die Welt erklären. Die Naturgesetze beschreiben die Welt, sie beschreiben die Gesetzmäßigkeiten. Aber sie erklären uns nichts.]”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein

“We have to be there at the birth of ideas, the bursting outward of their force: not in books expressing them, but in events manifesting this force, in struggles carried on around ideas, for or against them.”
― Michel Foucault

“إن أكثر من واحد هم مثلى، يكتبون، بلا شك، كى لا يكون لهم وجه واحد بعينه. فلا تطلبوا منى من أنا ولا تأمرونى بأن أظل أنا هو باستمرار: فتلك أخلاق الحالة المدنية؛ وهى أخلاق تحكم أوراقنا وبطاقاتنا الإدارية، كبطاقة الهوية. فلتتركنا وشأننا أحرار، حينما يتعلق الأمر بالكتابة”
― ميشيل فوكو, حفريات المعرفة

“Although some lesbians argue that butches have nothing to do with “being a man,” others insist that their butchness is or was only a route to a desired status as a man. These paradoxes have surely proliferated in recent years,
offering evidence of a kind of gender trouble that the text itself did not
anticipate.”
― Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity

“When I was twelve, I was interviewed by a doctoral candidate in education and asked what I wanted to be when I grew up. I said that I either wanted to be a philosopher or a clown, and I understood then, I think, that much depended on whether or not I found the world worth philosophizing about, and what the price of seriousness might be.”
― Judith Butler

“Oh! To live alone, always alone, in the midst of the crowd that surrounds me, without a word of love ever coming to gladden my soul, without a friendly hand reaching out to me!”
― Herculine Barbin, Herculine Barbin: Being the Recently Discovered Memoirs of a Nineteenth-century French Hermaphrodite

“The truly apocalyptic view of the world is that things do not repeat themselves. It isn’t absurd, e.g., to believe that the age of science and technology is the beginning of the end for humanity; that the idea of great progress is delusion, along with the idea that the truth will ultimately be known; that there is nothing good or desirable about scientific knowledge and that mankind, in seeking it, is falling into a trap. It is by no means obvious that this is not how things are.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value

“Our craving for generality has [as one] source … our preoccupation with the method of science. I mean the method of reducing the explanation of natural phenomena to the smallest possible number of primitive natural laws; and, in mathematics, of unifying the treatment of different topics by using a generalization. Philosophers constantly see the method of science before their eyes, and are irresistibly tempted to ask and answer in the way science does. This tendency is the real source of metaphysics, and leads the philosopher into complete darkness. I want to say here that it can never be our job to reduce anything to anything, or to explain anything. Philosophy really is “purely descriptive.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein

“You must always be puzzled by mental illness. The thing I would dread most, if I became mentally ill, would be your adopting a common sense attitude; that you could take it for granted that I was deluded”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein

“At the basis of the whole modern view of the world lies the illusion that the so-called laws of nature are the explanations of natural phenomena. So people stop short at natural laws as at something unassailable, as did the ancients at God and Fate.
And they both are right and wrong. But the ancients were clearer, in so far as they recognized one clear conclusion, whereas in the modern system it should appear as though everything were explained.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein

“Perhaps I know best why it is man alone who laughs; he alone suffers so deeply that he had to invent laughter.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“If someone does not believe in fairies, he does not need to teach his children 'There are no fairies'; he can omit to teach them the word 'fairy'.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein, Zettel

“Curiosity evokes ‘concern’; it evokes the care one takes for what exists and could exist; a readiness to find strange and singular what surrounds us; a certain relentlessness to break up our familiarities and to regard otherwise the same things; a fervor to grasp what is happening and what passes; a casualness in regard to the traditional hierarchies of the important and the essential. I dream of a new age of curiosity. We have the technical means for it; the desire is there; the things to be known are infinite; the people who can employ themselves at this task exist. Why do we suffer? From too little: from the channels that are too narrow, skimpy, quasi-monopolistic, insufficient. There is no point in adopting a protectionist attitude, to prevent ‘bad’ information from invading and suffocating the ‘good.’ Rather, we must multiply the paths and the possibility of comings and goings.”
― Michel Foucault

“I don't feel that it is necessary to know exactly what I am.”
― Michel Foucault, Tecnologías del yo y otros textos afines

“Maybe the target nowadays is not to discover what we are but to refuse what we are.”
― Michel Foucault