James Maconochie

“So acquire the habit of being present at this activity of the material and moral universe. Learn to look; compare what is before you with your familiar or secret ideas. Do not see in a town merely houses, but human life and history. Let a gallery or a museum show you something more than a collection of objects, let it show you schools of art and of life, conceptions of destiny and of nature, successive or varied tendencies of technique, of inspiration, of feeling. Let a workshop speak to you not only of iron and wood, but of man's estate, of work, of ancient and modern social economy, of class relationships. Let travel tell you of mankind; let scenery remind you of the great laws of the world; let the stars speak to you of measureless duration; let the pebbles on your path be to you the residue of the formation of the earth; let the sight of a family make you think of past generations; and let the least contact with your fellows throw light on the highest conception of man. If you cannot look thus, you will become, or be, a man of only commonplace mind. A thinker is like a filter, in which truths as they pass through leave their best substance behind.”
― Antonin Sertillanges, THE INTELLECTUAL LIFE, Its Spirit, Conditions, Methods - Sertillanges

“No religion has ever demanded as much of the individual as such, and it might be said that. radical individualism is the very form of religious integrism [fundamentalism]. The modern religion of selfabnegation, of all-out operationality - the worst one of all since it recoups all the energy of irreligion, all the energy released by the eclipsing of traditional religions. This is the greatest irreligious conversion in history. By comparison with this voluntary holocaust, this escalation of sacrifice, the so-called return of religion which we pretend to fear - these occasional upsurges of religiosity or traditional integrism - is negligible. It merely conceals the fundamental integrism of this consensual society, the terroristic fundamentalism of this new sacrificial religion of performance. It masks the fact that society as a whole is moving towards religious metastasis. Religious effects are taken too seriously in their religious dimension and not seriously enough as effects, that is, as masking the true process. This is a screen tumour, a fixation abscess which, by focusing it, allows the evil to be exorcized at little cost, sparing the need to analyse the whole society, to analyse 'democratic' society, which is virtually converted to integrism and revisionism, to security and protectionism and, at the same time, to the techniques of crude promotion and intimidation.
This 'post-modern' individualism arises not out of a problematic of liberty and liberation, but out of a liberalization of slave networks and circuits, that is, an individual diffraction of the programmed ensembles, a metamorphosis of the macro-structures into innumerable particles which bear within them all the stigmata of the networks and circuits - each one forming its own micro-network and micro-circuit, each one reviving for itself, in its micro-universe, the now useless totalitarianism of the whole.”
― Jean Baudrillard, The Illusion of the End

“God is a lamp without flame, a flame without fire, a fire without heat, a dark light, a silent rumble, a blind flash, a luminous soot, a ray of his own darkness, a circle that expands concentrating on its own center, a solitary multiplicity...”
― Umberto Eco, Baudolino

“Cuando todo tiene carácter de producción los rituales desaparecen.”
― Byung-Chul Han, La desaparición de los rituales: Una topología del presente