From time to time, too, and for the space of two or three paces, an image or an echo would rise up from the recesses of time: in the little streets o… - Claude Lévi-Strauss

"Var olduğundan beri, her zaman ve her yerde "fikrinin peşine düşmek" insanın en değişmez uğraşlarından biri olmuştur. Bu alıştırma insana bir tatmin sağlar, bir yarar bulur onda; bu arayışın nereye götüreceğini sormaz kendine.
Şu bir vaıkadır: Fantastik görünümlü fikirlerin; gerçek dünyanın uzun süre gizli kalmış hangi düzeyinin yansıması olduğunun keşfedilmesi yüzyıllar, hatta binyıllar alsa bile zihne ait güçlerin olanaklarının araştırılması daima bir yere varır - bilimsel düşüncenin, özellikle de matematiğin tarihi bunu ispatlar."

Just as the individual is not alone in the group, nor any one society alone among the others, so man is not alone in the universe. When the spectrum or rainbow of human cultures has finally sunk into the void created by our frenzy; as long as we continue to exist and there is a world, that tenuous arch linking us to the inaccessible will still remain, to show us the opposite course to that leading to enslavement; many may be unable to follow it, but its contemplation affords him the only privilege of which he can make himself worthy; that of arresting the process, of controlling the impulse which forces him to block up the cracks in the wall of necessity one by one and to complete his work at the same time as he shuts himself up within his prison; this is a privilege coveted by every society, whatever its beliefs, its political system or its level of civilization; a privilege to which it attaches its leisure, its pleasure, its peace of mind and its freedom; the possibility, vital for life, of unhitching, which consists - Oh! fond farewell to savages and explorations! - in grasping, during the brief intervals in which our species can bring itself to interrupt its hive-like activity, the essence of what it was and continues to be, below the threshold of thought and over and above society: in the contemplation of a mineral more beautiful than all our creations; in the scent that can be smelt at the heart of a lily and is more imbued with learning than all our books; or in the brief glance, heavy with patience, serenity and mutual forgiveness, that, through some involuntary understanding, one can sometimes exchange with a cat.

Every effort to understand destroys the object studied in favor of another object of a different nature; this second object requires from us a new effort which destroys it in favor of a third, and so on and so forth until we reach the one lasting presence, the point at which the distinction between meaning and the absence of meaning disappears: the same point from which we began.