The pornographic body lacks any symbolism. The ritualized body, by contrast, is a splendid stage, with secrets and deities written into it.

The freedom of the 'everyday mind' consists rather in not kneeling down in awe. Its mental attitude is better expressed as sitting unmoveable like an object.

Haikus allow the whole world to appear within things.

...Zen Buddhism, this religion of immanence.

God is nothingness: He is 'beyond all speech.'

...I pray to God to make me free of God.

At the deepest level, the desire for complete union with God exhibits a narcissistic structure.

Zen Buddhism is inspired by a basic trust in the Here, a basic trust in the world.

The huge laugh is a most extreme expression of freedom.

Enlightenment is an awakening to the everyday.

Emptiness empties the one seeing into what is seen.

Emptiness simply prevents what is individual from insisting on itself.

The emptiness of Zen Buddhism... creates a neighborly nearness between things.

To die is to wander.

When we resist impermanence, the self intensifies.

Emptiness is not a denial of the proper but an affirmation of it.

If life can no longer be narrated, wisdom deteriorates, and its place is taken by problem-solving.

Stories on digital platforms like Facebook or Instagram are not genuine stories. They have no narrative duration. Rather, they are just sequences of momentary impressions that do not tell us anything.

The smartphone seems to be a playground, but it is a digital panopticon.

Without narration, life is purely additive.

The reason that people take selfies is not narcissism. Rather, it is inner emptiness. There is no meaning to stabilize the ego. Faced with its inner emptiness, the ego constantly produces itself.

A screen bans reality.

Psychological disorders are symptoms of a blocked story... The patient is cured the moment she narrates herself free.

Violence and freedom are the two endpoints on the scale of power.

The task of power is to transform the always possible 'no' into a 'yes.'

Power is not opposed to freedom. It is precisely freedom that distinguishes power from violence or coercion.

A truly powerful holder of power does not simply elicit agreement, but enthusiasm and excitement.

Often what is absent has more power than what is present.

When power is separated from any communicative context, it becomes naked violence.

Power is more 'spacious' than violence. And violence becomes power if it 'gives itself more time.' Looked at from this perspective, power rests on an excess of space and time.

Architecture is a way for power to achieve eloquence through form.

Rather, power is most powerful, most stable, where it creates a feeling of freedom and where it does not need to resort to violence.

Power is never naked. Rather, it is eloquent.

An absolute power would be one that never becomes apparent, never pointed to itself, one that rather blended completely into what goes without saying. Power shines in its own absence.

Power turns pure being into a having.

Violence may capture space, but it does not create space.

Power tends to reduce openness... Power tries to solidify and stabilize its position by eradicating spaces open to play, or incalculable spaces.

An ethos of freedom stops power from solidifying into domination and makes sure it remains an open game.

Perhaps power is never free from a feeling of lack.

If life is deprived of any meaningful closure, it will be ended in non-time.

God functions like a stabilizer of time.

A farewell does not dilute the presence of the past; it may make an even deeper presence.

If things are deprived of memory, they become information or commodities. They are pushed into a time-free, ahistorical place.

Promising, committment, and fidelity, for instance, are genuinely temporal practices.

The haste of day rules over the night as empty form.

Full of gods means full of meaning, full of narration. The world becomes readable, like a picture.

Historical time knows no lasting present.

Information has no scent.

Time begins to emit a scent when it gains duration; when it is given a narrative or deep tension; when it gains depth and breadth, even space.

Twenty-first-century society is no longer a disciplinary society, but rather an achievement society.