Philippe

“The bike does this; it is an apotheosis of self-sufficiency, in which a well-loved machine will unhesitatingly and quietly mediate intentional being into momentum. As you ride a bike and start to ride it well, there are moments when it becomes an affirmation of life devoid of separation and distinction; you ride through the earth unthinkingly rather than across it. There is no need to account for who you are in others’ terms, in language, even. Your characteristics give way to your being. The effort put into the bike can take you out of your socialized, represented self into what Heidegger called ‘disclosing self’, where you simply are ever-shifting endeavour.”
― Robin Holt

“In the eclectic Gennadius one finds all these motivations: 'A worm is very humble and base, and you are glorious and proud; but if you are sensible, you yourself should humiliate your pride by meditating: my strength and my force become a shelter for worms.”
― G.P. Fedotov, Russian Religious Mind: Kievan Christianity

“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

“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