89 definitions
Birth (n.) strikes soul out of the embryo the way a blow strikes fire out of the breath sleeping in stones.
Character (n.) follows a person into sleep: the drunkard dozes still holding his flask, the miser napping with a fist on his purse.
Cohesion (n.) starts at home: whatever binds other things together must first be bound to itself, and every ruling faculty begins with itself.
Ethics (n.) should begin not with the good or the gods but with the newborn animal and the first thing it feels to be its own.
Fear (n.) is exact even in animals: chicks sleep on while a bull leaps around them, but shriek and dive under their mother’s wings at a weasel or a hawk.
Instinct (n.) is the body knowing its own armour: the bull lowers its horns, the tortoise tucks head and feet under its shell, the snail rolls into its horn.
Oikeiosis (n.) is the newborn’s first act: perceiving itself, the animal at once becomes its own, dear and familiar to itself and to its own make-up.
Perception (n.) was not given to us only to grasp the outside world; before anything else it is an animal grasping itself.
Perception (n.) always carries a perception of oneself: seeing white, we feel ourselves whitened; tasting something sweet, sweetened; touching heat, heated.
Reason (n.) is the weapon that makes beasts swifter, bigger and stronger than us still turn and run when they sense it.
Self-knowledge (n.) runs deeper than looks: the deer trusts its spindly legs and, finding its splendid horns a hindrance in flight, smashes them off against the rocks.