The Elegance of the Hedgehog

by Muriel Barbery

‘Whosoever sows desire harvests oppression,’

With the exception of love, friendship and the beauty of Art, I don’t see much else that can nurture human life.

Well, when I say Art, don’t get me wrong: I’m not just talking about great works of art by great masters. Even Vermeer can’t convince me to hold life dear. He’s sublime, but he’s dead. No, I’m referring to the beauty that is there in the world, things that, being part of the movement of life, elevate us.

don’t really know how to explain it, but when we move, we are in a way destructured by our movement towards something: we are both here and at the same time not here because we’re already in the process of going elsewhere, if you see what I mean. To stop destructuring yourself, you have to stop moving altogether. Either you move and you’re no longer whole, or you’re whole and you can’t move. But that player, when I saw him go out onto the field, I could tell there was something different about him. The impression that he was moving, yes, but by staying in one place.

Derrida, on deconstruction

What makes the strength of a soldier isn’t the energy he uses trying to intimidate his opponent by sending him a load of signals, it’s the strength he’s able to concentrate within himself, by staying centred.

We are mistaken to believe that our consciousness is awakened at the moment of our first birth – perhaps because we do not know how to imagine any other living state.

The only purpose of cats is that they constitute mobile decorative objects, a concept which I find intellectually interesting, but, unfortunately, our cats have such drooping bellies that this does not apply to them.

Deprived of the steady guiding hand that any good education

the autodidact possesses nonetheless the gift of freedom and conciseness of thought, where official discourse would put up barriers and prohibit adventure.

He understands how the human species, given only to survival, slowly matured and arrived one fine day at an intuition of pleasure, the

humans live in a world where it’s words and not deeds that have power, where the ultimate skill is mastery of language.

Humans live in a world where the weak are dominant. This is a terrible insult to our animal nature, a sort of perversion or a deep contradiction.