The Five Senses Quotes

“The skin is a variety of contingency: in it, through it, with it, the world and my body touch each other, the feeling and the felt, it defines their common edge. Contingency means common tangency: in it the world and the body intersect and caress each other. I do not wish to call the place in which I live a medium, I prefer to say that things mingle with each other and that I am no exception to that. I mix with the world which mixes with me. Skin intervenes between several things in the world and makes them mingle.”
― Michel Serres, The Five Senses: A Philosophy of Mingled Bodies

“What is the good of power and precision if the price we pay is ugliness and death? What is the good of thinking, if we have no idea how to live?”
― Michel Serres, The Five Senses: A Philosophy of Mingled Bodies

“We no longer live addicted to speech; having lost our senses, now we are going to lose language, too. We will be addicted to data, naturally. Not data that comes from the world, or from language, but encoded data. To know is to inform oneself. Information is becoming our primary and universal addiction.”
― Michel Serres, The Five Senses: A Philosophy of Mingled Bodies

“Now it could be said that he who cheats and deceits does so because he wants to win. So the first attribute of God consists in being indifferent to winning.
Detach yourself from notions of winning or losing, be indifferent to victory or loss, you will enter into science, observation, discovery and thought.”
― Michel Serres, The Five Senses: A Philosophy of Mingled Bodies

“The body receives gratuity. The world gives graciously, disinterestedly, asking for nothing back, expecting nothing in return; it has no scales, no balance sheet. Our senses cede nothing in return for it, can give nothing back to the source of given beauties. What could the eye give back to the sun, or the palate to the vines of Yquem?”
― Michel Serres, The Five Senses: A Philosophy of Mingled Bodies

“Nothing is constructed, made or invented, except in relative peace, in a small, rare pocket of local peace maintained in the middle of the universal devastation produced by perpetual war.”
― Michel Serres, The Five Senses: A Philosophy of Mingled Bodies

“Undergo the quiet treatment of the five senses. It is enough to accept what is gratuitously given.”
― Michel Serres, The Five Senses: A Philosophy of Mingled Bodies

“The given - forgive me - what is marketable, is only given - forgive me - is only sold in and through language. [...] Triumphant, the word redeems anything that could lend taste or aroma and transubstantiates it into something seen and read and heard, the channels that are peculiar to it.
This - what you eat and drink - is the body and blood of the word.
Here - where you buy it - lies the grave of bread and wine, body and blood, dead and resuscitated as messages.”
― Michel Serres, The Five Senses: A Philosophy of Mingled Bodies

“Qui regle à sa guise les code at leur circulation dans l'espace peut laisser reposer les veilleurs.”
― Michel Serres, The Five Senses: A Philosophy of Mingled Bodies