10 Quotes by Michel Serres

„Die Musik wird aus dem Rauschen geboren: das erste menschliche Lallen, die erste Information im Chaos. Aus seiner Quelle entsprungen, lässt dieser Strom der Arrangements und Kombinationen, der in Melodien und Harmonien zur Sprache hinabfließt, die Negentropie anwachsen.[...]

Voyaging begins when one burns one’s boats, adventures begin with a shipwreck.

The only philosophy is that of language, the only religion is that of the word.

You who look at everything through your perpetually open eyes, is your lucidity never bathed in tears?

Smell and taste differentiate, whereas language, like sight and hearing, integrates.

What philosophy worthy of the name has truly been able to avoid the link between poem and theorem?

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.

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.

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?