Vitalism Quotes

“Signs imply ways of living, possibilities of existence, they are the symptoms of an overflowing (jaillissante) or exhausted (épuisée) life. But an artist cannot be content with an exhausted life, nor with a personal life. One does not write with one's ego, one's memory, and one's illnesses. In the act of writing there's an attempt to make life something more personal, to liberate life from what imprisons it...There is a profound link between signs, the event, life, and vitalism. It is the power of nonorganic life, that which can be found in a line of a drawing, a line of writing, a line of music. It is organisms that die, not life. There is no work of art that does not indicate an opening for life, a path between the cracks. Everything I have written has been vitalistic, at least I hope so, and constitutes a theory of signs and the event.”
― Gilles Deleuze

“It’s the poet we love in Caeiro, not the philosopher. What we really get from these poems is a childlike sense of life, with all the direct materiality of the child’s mind, and all the vital spirituality of hope and increase that exist in the body and soul of nescient childhood. Caeiro’s work is a dawn that wakes us up and quickens us; a more that material, more than anti-spiritual dawn. It’s an abstract effect, pure vacuum, nothingness.”
― Álvaro de Campos

“We have come to understand the phenomena of life only as an assemblage of the lifeless. We take the mechanistic abstractions of our technical calculation to be ultimately concrete and "fundamentally real," while our most intimate experiences are labelled "mere appearance" and something having reality only within the closet of the isolated mind.

Suppose however we were to invert this whole scheme, reverse the order in which it assigns abstract and concrete. What is central to our experience, then, need not be peripheral to nature. This sunset now, for example, caught within the network of bare winter branches, seems like a moment of benediction in which the whole of nature collaborates. Why should not these colours and these charging banners of light be as much a part of the universe as the atoms and molecules that make them up? If they were only "in my mind," then I and my mind would no longer be a part of nature. Why should the pulse of life toward beauty and value not be a part of things?

Following this path, we do not vainly seek to assemble the living out of configurations of dead stuff, but we descend downwards from more complex to simpler grades of the organic. From humans to trees to rocks; from "higher grade" to "lower grade" organisms. In the universe of energy, any individual thing is a pattern of activity within the flux, and thereby an organism at some level.”
― William Barrett, The Illusion of Technique: A Search for Meaning in a Technological Civilization

“Recursion is the movement that tirelessly integrates contingency into its own functioning to realize its telos. In so doing it generates an impenetrable complexity in the course of time. Organisms exhibit a complexity of relations between parts and whole inside the body and with its environment (e.g. structural coupling) in its functioning. Life also exhibits such complexity, since it expects the unexpected, and in every encounter it attempts to turn the unexpected into an event that can contribute to its singularity.”
― Yuk Hui, Recursivity and Contingency

“Cuvantul acesta e frumos, e un cuvant foarte frumos. Si cuprinde foarte multe lucruri… De aceea imi place si-l intrebuintez des… Sa nu respecti nimic, sa nu crezi decat in tine, in tineretea ta, in biologia ta, daca vrei… Cine nu debuteaza asa, fata de el insusi sau fata de lume – nu va crea nimic, va ramane sterp, timorat, coplesit de adevaruri. Sa poti uita adevarurile, sa ai atata viata in tine incat sa nu te poata patrunde, nici intimida – iata vocatia de huligan…”
― Mircea Eliade, Huliganii

“Nothing lasts forever. The most unforseen circumstances will swamp you and baffle the wisest calculations. Only vitality and plenty of it helps you.
Washington A. Roebling quoted by”
― David McCullough, The Great Bridge: The Epic Story of the Building of the Brooklyn Bridge