Sociologists From France

"Legitimate manners owe their value to the fact that they manifest the rarest conditions of acquisition, that is, a social power over time which is tacitly recognized as the supreme excellence: to possess things from the past, i.e., accumulated, crystallized history, aristocratic names and titles, châteaux or ’stately homes’, paintings and collections, vintage wines and antique furniture, is to master time, through all those things whose common feature is that they can only be acquired in the course of time, by means of time, against time, that is, by inheritance or through dispositions which, like the taste for old things, are likewise only acquired with time and applied by those who can take their time."

"The most successful ideological effects are those which have no need of words, and ask no more than complicitous silence"

"Practice has a logic which is not that of the logician."

"The point of my work is to show that culture and education aren't simply hobbies or minor influences."

"If the sociologist has a role, it is probably more to furnish weapons than to give lessons."

"Overall, Bourdieu's work provides a dynamic model of structural inequality; it enables researchers to capture "moments" of cultural and social reproduction. To understand the character of these moments, researchers need to look at the contexts in which capital is situated, the efforts by individuals to activate their capital, the skill with which they do so, and the institutional response to the activation of resources. Unfortunately, Bourdieu's empirical work has not paid sufficient attention to the difference between the possession of capital and the activation of capital." Nor has he focused attention on the crucial mediating role of individuals who serve as "gatekeepers" and decision makers in organizations."

"The practical mastery of the logic or of the imminent necessity of a game — a mastery acquired by experience of the game, and one which works outside conscious control and discourse (in the way that. for instance, techniques of the body do)."

"You can fight the international technocracy in an efficient way only by challenging it on its very own field of activity, the economic science, and by opposing a kind of knowledge that respects human beings and realities towards that mutilated kind of knowledge used by the technocrats themselves."

"Pierre Bourdieu [was] a leading French sociologist and maverick intellectual who emerged as a public figure here in the 1990's by championing the antiglobalization movement and other anti-establishment causes."

"Fantasy changes the world deliberately, allowing impossible things which science fiction at least pretends not to allow. Yes, I say "what if magic worked, and then...," and "what if there were dragons... yes. Then you just follow out, you just follow the fictional enterprise like any novelist, it seems to me, and the more detailed and accurate you are, the better the book will be. And of course, the tricky thing about imaginative fiction, both science fiction and fantasy, is the coherence of the imagination, because you are making a whole world out of words only. It's all made to hold together. Tolkien is very clear about that in some of his essays. He's the best theorist of fantasy I know, actually, Tolkien himself. The European fantasy theorists, Todorov, and those people, they are terrible, terrible. The works they are talking about always seem so insignificant to me. That's not what I mean by fantasy."

"Pride is not a wise counselor. People who believe themselves to be the incarnation of good have a distorted view of the world. The absence of any obstacle to the deployment of strength is dangerous for the strong themselves: passion takes precedence over reason. "No power without limit can be legitimate," as Montesquieu wrote long ago. Political wisdom does not consist in seeking only immediate victory, nor does it require systematic preference of "us" over "them.""

"A maxim for the twenty-first century might well be to start not by fighting evil in the name of good, but by attacking the certainties of people who claim always to know where good and evil are to be found. We should struggle not against the devil himself but what allows the devil to live — Manichaean thinking itself."

"American society has always exercised a stronger pressure on individual behavior than Western European societies; but in time of war this pressure is notched a few degrees, and starts to become quite alarming."

"Democracy brought to others through the barrel of a gun is not democracy; to impose it by force is to undermine it."

"Nothing is more commonplace than the reading experience, and yet nothing is more unknown. Reading is such a matter of course that at first glance it seems there is nothing to say about it."

""Memory is a field full of psychological ruins," wrote French philosopher Gaston Bachelard. For some that may be true, but memory is also a field of healing that has the capacity to restore the world, not only for the one person who recollects, but for cultures as well. When a person says "I remember," all things are possible."

"One must always maintain one’s connection to the past and yet ceaselessly pull away from it. To remain in touch with the past requires a love of memory. To remain in touch with the past requires a constant imaginative effort."

"Two half philosophers will probably never a whole metaphysician make."

"Even a minor event in the life of a child is an event of that child’s world and thus a world event."

"To feel most beautifully alive means to be reading something beautiful, ready always to apprehend in the flow of language the sudden flash of poetry."

"Ideas are invented only as correctives to the past. Through repeated rectifications of this kind one may hope to disengage an idea that is valid."

"There is no original truth, only original error."

"Man is an imagining being."

"The repose of sleep refreshes only the body. It rarely sets the soul at rest. The repose of the night does not belong to us. It is not the possession of our being. Sleep opens within us an inn for phantoms. In the morning we must sweep out the shadows."

"The words of the world want to make sentences."

"The subconscious is ceaselessly murmuring, and it is by listening to these murmurs that one hears the truth."

"Reverie is not a mind vacuum. It is rather the gift of an hour which knows the plenitude of the soul."

"To live life well is to express life poorly; if one expresses life too well, one is living it no longer."

"A special kind of beauty exists which is born in language, of language, and for language."

"Ideas are refined and multiplied in the commerce of minds. In their splendor, images effect a very simple communion of souls."

"Poetry is one of the destinies of speech.... One would say that the poetic image, in its newness, opens a future to language."

"A word is a bud attempting to become a twig. How can one not dream while writing? It is the pen which dreams. The blank page gives the right to dream."

"Words … are little houses, each with its cellar and garret. Common sense lives on the ground floor, always ready to engage in ‘foreign commerce’ on the same level as the others, as the passers-by, who are never dreamers. To go upstairs in the word house is to withdraw step by step; while to go down to the cellar is to dream, it is losing oneself in the distant corridors of an obscure etymology, looking for treasures that cannot be found in words. To mount and descend in the words themselves—this is a poet’s life. To mount too high or descend too low is allowed in the case of poets, who bring earth and sky together."

"If I were asked to name the chief benefit of the house, I should say: the house shelters day-dreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace."

"The mollusk's motto would be: one must live to build one's house, and not build one's house to live in."

"I am a dreamer of words, of written words. I think I am reading; a word stops me. I leave the page. The syllables of the word begin to move around. Stressed accents begin to invert. The word abandons its meaning like an overload which is too heavy and prevents dreaming. Then words take on other meanings as if they had the right to be young. And the words wander away, looking in the nooks and crannies of vocabulary for new company, bad company."

"A man is a man to the extent that he is a superman. A man should be defined by the sum of those tendencies which impel him to surpass the human condition."

"To disappear into deep water or to disappear toward a far horizon, to become part of depth of infinity, such is the destiny of man that finds its image in the destiny of water."

"True poetry is a function of awakening. It awakens us, but it must retain the memory of previous dreams."

"The reflected world is the conquest of calm"

"Man is a creation of desire, not a creation of need."

"Childhood lasts all through life. It returns to animate broad sections of adult life.... Poets will help us to find this living childhood within us, this permanent, durable immobile world."

"Literary imagination is an aesthetic object offered by a writer to a lover of books."

"The primitive mentality is a condition of the human mind, and not a stage in its historical development."

"I very much believe in the influence of magic and the subconscious on the literary process...I think that magic has to do with the subconscious, much as the ancient sorcerers believed. The identification of man with his material surroundings and his active participation in that world are detailed in the books of Carlos Castaneda, for example, as well as, on a different level, with the books of sociologists like Lévy-Bruhl and Ernest Cassirer, or Lévi-Strauss. The magical identification has a lot to do with literature, this alternate way of viewing the world."

"One day, we shall stand up and our backsides will remain attached to our seats."

"There is no aphrodisiac like innocence."

"Boredom is like a pitiless zooming in on the epidermis of time. Every instant is dilated and magnified like the pores of the face."

"Dying is nothing. You have to know how to disappear. Dying comes down to a biological chance and that is of no consequence. Disappearing is of a far higher order of necessity. You must not leave it to biology to decide when you will disappear. To disappear is to pass into an enigmatic state which is neither life nor death. Some animals know how to do this, as do savages, who withdraw while still alive, from the sight of their own people."

"A series of accidents creates a positively lighthearted state."