The human being suffocates among its own doings. What is necessary is a revitalization of the vita contemplativa, because it opens up spaces for breathing. Perhaps the mind itself owes its emergence to an excess of time, an otium, even to a slowness of breath. A reinterpretation of pneuma, which means breath as well as spirit, is conceivable.

At the very moment when the dancer stops in his movement, he becomes aware of the totality of space. This moment of hesitation is the condition for the beginning of an altogether different dance.

Thinking is also marked by a melody.

Time pressures also make what is ambivalent and undecidable, what hovers – the complex or aporetic – give way to a crude distinctness.

Without rest human beings are incapable of seeing what is at rest. Making the vita activa an absolute value drives everything out of life that is not an act or activity.

A special temporality and spatiality is intrinsic to thinking that rises above calculating. It does not progress in linear fashion. Thinking is free because its place and time cannot be calculated. It often progresses discontinuously, while calculating follows a linear path.

Because there is ‘no time for thinking, and no rest in thinking’,49 divergent views are avoided. They are just hated.

Active people roll like a stone, conforming to the stupidity of mechanics.

Whoever does not know how to hesitate is a labourer.