Michel Serres Quotes

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

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.

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.

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

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