27+ Michel De Certeau Quotes On Art, Education And Nature

Michel De Certeau was a French writer and philosopher who was born in 1925. He is best known for his book The Practice of Everyday Life, which examines the ways in which people interact with and make use of the spaces and structures of society. He is also known for his work on the history of Christianity, the sociology of culture, and the psychology of language. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Michel De Certeau on art, education, life.

Top 10 Michel De Certeau Quotes

1. A memory is only a Prince Charming who stays just long enough to awaken the Sleeping Beauties of our wordless stories.
2. To walk is to lack a place. It is the indefinite process of being absent and in search of a proper.
3. The only freedom supposed to be left to the masses is that of grazing on the ration of simulacra the system distributes to each individual.
4. More than its utilitarian and technocratic transparency, it is the opaque ambivalence of its oddities that makes the city livable.
5. To walk is to lack a place.
6. The panorama-city is a 'theoretical' (that is, visual) simulacrum, in short a picture, whose condition of possibility is an oblivion and a misunderstanding of practices.
7. One is a socialist because one used to be one, no longer going to demonstrations, attending meetings, sending in one's dues, in short, without paying.
8. As a first approximation, I define belief not as the object of believing (a dogma, a program, etc.) but as the subject's investment in a proposition, the act of saying it and considering it as true.
9. An absence of meaning opens a gap in time.
10. The created order is everywhere punched and torn open by ellipses, drifts, and leaks of meaning: it is a sieve-order.

Michel De Certeau Famous Quotes And Sayings

To practice space is thus to repeat the joyful and silent experience of childhood; it is, in a place, to be other and to move toward the other...Kandinsky dreamed of: 'a great city built according to all the rules of architecture and then suddenly shaken by a force that defies all calculation. — Michel De Certeau

The trace left behind is substituted for the practice. It exhibits the (voracious) property that the geographical system has of being able to transform action into legibility, but in doing so it causes a way of being in the world to be forgotten. — Michel De Certeau

The sick man is taken away by the institution that takes charge not of the individual, but of his illness, an isolated object transformed or eliminated by technicians devoted to the defense of health the way others are attached to the defense of law and order or tidiness. — Michel De Certeau

The sick man must follow his illness to the place where it is treated. He is set aside in one of the technical and secret zones (hospitals, prisons, refuse dumps) which relieve the living of everything that might hinder the chain of production and consumption, and which repair and select what can be sent back up to the surface of progress. — Michel De Certeau

The media transforms the great silence of things into its opposite. Formerly constituting a secret, the real now talks constantly. News reports, information, statistics, and surveys are everywhere. — Michel De Certeau

Can the vast technology beneath our gaze be anything but a representation? Any optical artifact... The city panorama is a theoretical (ie visual) simulacrum: in short, a picture, of which the preconditions for feasibility are forgetfulness and a misunderstanding of processes. — Michel De Certeau

The walking of passers-by offers a series of turns and detours that can be compared to "turns of phrase" or "stylistic figures." There is a rhetoric of walking. The art of "turning" phrases finds an equivalent in an art of composing a path. — Michel De Certeau

They become liberated spaces that can be occupied. A rich indetermination gives them, by means of a semantic rarefaction, the function of articulating a second, poetic geography on top of the geography of the literal, forbidden or permitted meaning. They insinuate other routes into the functionalist and historical order of movement. Walking follows them: 'I fill this great empty space with a beautiful name.' — Michel De Certeau

New York has never learnt the art of growing old by playing on all its pasts. Its present invents itself, from hour to hour, in the act of throwing away its previous accomplishments and challenging the future. A city composed of paroxysmal places in monumental reliefs. — Michel De Certeau

When he grew old, Aristotle, who is not generally considered a tightrope dancer, liked to lose himself in the most labyrinthine and subtle of discourses […]. ‘The more solitary and isolated I become, the more I come to like stories,’ he said. — Michel De Certeau

Political organizations have slowly substituted themselves for the Churches as the places for believing practices. Politics has once again become religious. — Michel De Certeau

It seems possible to give a preliminary definition of walking as a space of enunciation. — Michel De Certeau

Places are fragmentary and inward-turning histories, pasts that others are not allowed to read, accumulated times that can be unfolded but like stories held in reserve, remaining in an enigmatic state, symbolizations encysted in the pain or pleasure of he body. 'I feel good here': the well-being under-expressed in the language it appears in like a fleeting glimmer is a spatial practice. — Michel De Certeau

Along with the lazy man... the dying man is the immoral man: the former, a subject that does not work; the latter, an object that no longer even makes itself available to be worked on by others. — Michel De Certeau

It is as though the practices organizing a bustling city were characterized by [city practitioners', everyday citizens'] blindness. The neworks of these moving, intersecting writings compose a manifold story that has neither author nor spectator, shaped out of fragments of trajectories and alterations of spaces: in relation to representations, it remains daily and indefinitely other. — Michel De Certeau

Political organizations have slowly substituted themselves for the Churches as the places of believing practices, but for this very reason, they seem to have been haunted by the return of a very ancient (preChristian) and very “pagan” alliance between power and religion. It is as though now that religion has ceased to be an autonomous power (the “power of religion,” people used to say), politics has once again become religious. — Michel De Certeau

Everyday life invents itself by poaching in countless ways on the property of others. — Michel De Certeau

Life Lessons by Michel De Certeau

1. Michel De Certeau emphasizes the importance of understanding power dynamics, and how the everyday person can use their creative agency to challenge the dominant power structures.
2. He encourages readers to think of their everyday lives as a form of creative resistance, and to recognize the potential for creative expression in everyday activities.
3. Michel De Certeau's work reminds us that we can use our everyday experiences to shape and challenge the world around us.