Any person, brought into the presence of this fact, stops for a few moments and remains pensive and silent; and then generally leaves, carrying with him forever a sharper, keener sense of our incessant motion through space.
Interpretation
This quote emphasizes the profound impact of realizing our perpetual motion through space, provoking deep reflection.
Leon Foucault's quote reflects on the moment of awareness that individuals experience when confronted with the reality of their existence and motion in the universe. This realization often leads to introspection, prompting us to contemplate our place in the cosmos and the nature of time and space itself, leaving us with a heightened sense of awareness that endures long after the initial thought.
In practice
This quote can inspire deep discussions in a philosophical class.
And didn't it always go like that--body parts not lining up the way you wanted them to, all of it a little bit off, as if the world itself were an animated sequence of longing and envy and self-hatred and grandiosity and failure and success, a strange and endless cartoon loop that you couldn't stop watching, because, despite all you knew by now, it was still so interesting.
It is not good to be too free. It is not good to have everything one wants.
Men and governments must act to the best of their ability. There is no such thing as absolute certainty but there is assurance sufficient for the purposes of human life.
No one doubts but that we imagine time from the very fact that we imagine other bodies to be moved slower or faster or equally fast. We are accustomed to determine duration by the aid of some measure of motion.
We fancy men are individuals; so are pumpkins; but every pumpkin in the field goes through every point of pumpkin history.
It was behaviour that I thought not far from racism, sexism or any other kind of prejudice or snobbery. 'Because you are not cute, I do not want to know you' was, to me, hardly different from suggesting 'because you are gay, I dislike you
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