'Televisions would disclose everyone's private life.'

'They now live in another dimension. Time is precious.'

'But did he believe in himself?'

It's part of the grammar of 'we' that someone can simply declare, 'there is no "us"'. Unhappy are the places and times where this goes unsaid because it's known all too well.

I used to prefer 'Protection'. Now I prefer 'Safe From Harm'.

'Die richtige Methode der Philosophie wäre eigentlich die: Nichts zu sagen, als was sich sagen läßt, also Sätze der Naturwissenschaft – also etwas, was mit Philosophie nichts zu tun hat –, und dann immer, wenn ein anderer etwas Metaphysisches sagen wollte, ihm nachzuweisen, daß er gewissen Zeichen in seinen Sätzen keine Bedeutung gegeben hat. Diese Methode wäre für den anderen unbefriedigend – er hätte nicht das Gefühl, daß wir ihn Philosophie lehrten – aber sie wäre die einzig streng richtige.'

'Das denkende, vorstellende, Subjekt gibt es nicht.

Wenn ich ein Buch schriebe »Die Welt, wie ich sie vorfand«, so wäre darin auch über meinen Leib zu berichten und zu sagen, welche Glieder meinem Willen unterstehen und welche nicht etc., dies ist nämlich eine Methode, das Subjekt zu isolieren, oder vielmehr zu zeigen, daß es in einem wichtigen Sinne kein Subjekt gibt: Von ihm allein nämlich könnte in diesem Buche nicht die Rede sein. –'

'This taste, this clinamen, can either be warded off or embraced. To take on a form-of-life is not simply to know a penchant: it means to think it. I call thought that which converts a form-of-life into a force, into a sensible effectivity.

In every situation there is one line that stands out among all the others, the line along which power grows. Thought is the capacity for singling out and following this line. A form-of-life can be embraced only by following this line, meaning that: all thought is strategic.

…

… "My" form-of-life does not relate to what I am, but to how, to the specific way, I am what I am. In other words, between a being and its qualities, there is the abyss of its own presence and the singular experience I have of it, at a certain place and time. Unfortunately for Empire, the form-of-life animating a body is not to be found in any of its predicates—big, white, crazy, rich, poor, carpenter, arrogant, woman, or French—but in the singular way of its presence, in the irreducible event of its being-in-situation. And it is precisely where predication is most violently applied—in the rank domain of morality—that its failure fills us with joy: when, for example, we come across a completely abject being whose way of being abject nevertheless touches us in such a way that any repulsion within us is snuffed out, and in this way proves to us that abjection is itself a quality.

To embrace a form-of-life means being more faithful to our penchants than to our predicates.'

'… such is the nature of "own paths." No one comes to help him along the way; he alone must contend with all the danger, chance, malice, and bad weather that befall him. He has his path for himself—and also of course his bitterness, his occasional vexation over this "for himself": part of which includes, for instance, his knowledge that even his friends cannot discern where he is or where he's going and that, from time to time, they ask themselves, "What? Is he even going at all? Does he still have—a path?"'