Quotes from Peter Sloterdijk

Mysticism is the acquired immunodeficiency of regional ontologies; one catches it through unprotected thought intercourse with the stirred-up concept of the infinite.

Repetition plus translation plus generalization results, with the correct calculation, in clarification. If there is such a thing as 'progress in religion', it can only manifest itself as increasing explicitness.

In his critique of reason, Nietzsche accomplished nothing less than the proof that all cognition is local in character and that, in imitating the divine eye, no human observer is able to go as far as really transcending his own location.

We are in an outside that carries inner worlds.

In the midst of the ubiquitous dealings with prostituted signs, the thing-poem was capable of opening up the prospect of returning to credible experiences of meaning. It did this by tying language to the gold standard of what things themselves communicate. Where randomness is disabled, authority should shine forth.

One can define conservatism as the political form of melancholy. Fluctuating between equanimity and disgust, the conservative watches the activities of those moved by progressive feelings and waits for entropy to do its work.

Alors que ce mauvais siècle approche de sa fin, le pressentiment se répand que l'idée de faire histoire n'était qu'un prétexte. Le sujet décisif de la modernité, c'est de faire nature.

It is not an exaggeration to identify the flight of the radical left to 'antifascism' as the most successful maneuver of language politics in the twentieth century.

Of a techno-human culture that wants to be more than a successful barbarism, two things above all are required: psychological cultural formation and the cultural capacity for translation. Mathematicians must become poets, cyberneticists must become philosophers of religion, doctors must become composers, computer scientists must become shamans. Was humanity ever something other than the art of managing transitions?

A philosopher is one who, as an athlete of totality, is laden with the weight of the world. The essence of philosophy as a form of living is philponia — friendship with the entirety of weighty and worth things. The love of wisdom and the love of the weight of the one whole are unified.

the spirit of Heidegger's dictum that thinking and thanking belong together, so do reading and collecting. The professional reader, the scholar, or the pandit becomes the agent of a novel form of concentration: indeed, he not only collects, he turns himself into a collection, a person filled up with knowledge that moves to and fro between internal and external memories.

A humanist is a person who can say: I am human, nothing written down is strange to me.

portrait of the theoretician as a young man. His first distinguishing feature is the serenity of indirect defeatism. Although he belongs to a collective of losers

The human being does not hop out of the magician's hat in the way that the ape climbs down from the tree; he also does not emerge from the hand of a creator who surveys everything in advance with his foreknowledge. He is the product of a production that is not itself a human being. The human being was not yet what he would become before he became it.

Gabriel Tardes's remark that "life is a search for the impossible via the useless.

Ecstasy, as philosophy understands it, is not a phenomenon of light-headedness that interests psychologists or chemists, but the way in which the being represents itself as tenseness in an Elsewhere

The academy is the architectural equivalent of what Husserl apostrophized as epoché—a building for shutting out the world and bracketing in concern, an asylum for the mysterious guests that we call ideas and theorems. In today's parlance, we would call it a retreat or a hideaway.

En el caso de algunos estímulos semánticos, como "frontera", "inmigración" o "integración", la expectativa alimentaria del participante cultural adiestrado exitosamente está tan firmemente fijada, que la saliva invade de inmediato. Mientras esté mojado en los foros, se puede suponer que las secreciones se mantienen inofensivas.

the joys of a liberality that still appreciates the living plural and the inviolable legitimacy of doxa (meaning "common belief," from dokei moi: "it seems to me"); articulating the human right of each person to his or her own point of view.

P]eople keep believing everywhere else, but in our society we have glorified disillusionment. Indeed, why should Europeans be the only ones on a metaphysical diet when the rest of the world continues to dine unperturbed at the richly decked tables of illusion?

El conservadurismo de izquierda, que es mi color desde hace mucho tiempo, se incluye entre los matices que están en peligro de desaparecer en un clima hostil a las diferencias.

Os colarinhos-brancos, os moderadores e críticos cresceram em quase toda parte à custa dos criativos e deixam-se festejar como os verdadeiros criadores.

Sin embargo, dado que entre intelectuales nunca creo en "malentendidos" (esto es diferente en el caso de las personas ingenuas), sino que sistemáticamente parto de lecturas falsas intencionales, es decir, de reflejos condicionados de segundo grado, me parece razonable investigar los motivos de las interpretaciones erróneas evidentes. Por el momento, me limito al caso de Münkler

Talvez, por menos oportuno que possa parecer, se devesse dizer mais uma vez: no mundo que sucedeu à graça, a arte foi o asilo das exceções que restaram.