“Every trail, however erratic and circuitous, is a kind of life-line, a trajectory of growth. 6 This image of life as a trail or path is ubiquitous among peoples whose existential orientations are founded in the practices of hunting and gathering, and in the modes of environmental perception these entail. Persons are identified and characterised not by the substantive attributes they carry into the life process, but by the kinds of paths they leave.”
― The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill
― The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill
“what the effect would be of overturning prevailing assumptions and of adopting … a fundamental orientation towards the ground.”
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“Curiosity is a vice that has been stigmatized in turn by Christianity, by philosophy, and even by a certain conception of science. Curiosity is seen as futility. However, I like the word; it suggests something quite different to me. It evokes “care”; it evokes the care one takes of what exists and what might exist; a sharpened sense of reality, but one that is never immobilized before it; a readiness to find what surrounds us strange and odd; a certain determination to throw off familiar ways of thought and to look at the same things in a different way; a passion for seizing what is happening now and what is disappearing; a lack of respect for the traditional hierarchies of what is important and fundamental. I dream of a new age of curiosity.”
― Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Interviews and Other Writings, 1977-1984
― Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Interviews and Other Writings, 1977-1984
“Life itself is as much a long walk as it is a long conversation, and the ways along which we walk are those along which we live.”
― Ways of Walking
― Ways of Walking
“Liberation—not a gift, not a self-achievement, but a mutual process.”
― Pedagogy of the Oppressed
― Pedagogy of the Oppressed
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