Philippe

“People think they need to be healed, but the truth is much more beautiful. Even a minute is more than we deserve. No one should be anything but dead. Instead we get honey of out rocks. Miracles from nothing. It’s easy. We don’t need to get better. We’re already us. And everything that is, is ours.”
― Richard Powers

“Wouldn't it be nice to return to some of the old theories? Soul and body? The four humours?'
'Oh, they never worked.'
'Of course they did. Everything works in its own period. Don't you think that people were cured by medieval doctors, soaking up black melancholy bile with white salpetre? We could no more use their remedies than they could use ours, but they did work once. That's what you have to remember. Of course some people say that they might work again.”
― Peter Ackroyd, The House of Doctor Dee

“Schopenhauer remarked that buying books would be better if you could also buy the time to read them. Books are different from natural objects in that they can overwhelm us in a way that nature’s abundance rarely does. There has always been too much to know; the universe is thoroughly baffling. When we walk into a bookstore, it is easy to feel oppressed by the amount of knowledge on tap. Why don’t we have the same feeling in a forest, at the beach, in a big city, or simply in breathing? There is more going on in our body every second than we will ever understand, and yet we rarely feel bothered by our inability to know it all. Books, however, are designed to make demands on our attention and time: they hail us in ways that nature rarely does. A thing is what Heidegger calls zunichtsgedrängt, relaxed and bothered about nothing. A plant or stone is as self-sufficient as the Aristotelian god or Heidegger’s slacker things, but books are needy. They cry out for readers as devils hunger for souls.”
― John Durham Peters, The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media

“What remains, in fact? What else is there still right in front of us but the grass which grows and the mountains which erode, bodies which become heavy and faces which become emaciated, life which fecundates, or becomes exhausted, or rather which, while fecundating, is already starting to become exhausted? And vague expectations that crystallize into feverish passion, or else meetings that become less frequent. Or amorous complicities which, without being confessed, turn into relations of power? Or heroic revolutions which (without our being able to locate when) mutate into the privileges of the Party? Or else the wounds of yesterday which are displaced, buried and condensed, and then transcribe themselves into encrypted representation of dreams - and works which ripen in silence?”
― François Jullien, The Silent Transformations