“The conscious experience of being a subject arises when a single organism learns to enslave itself.”

“It is this outer reach of existential abnegation – the moment where subjective identity deserts itself and becomes enslaved without consciousness of its subjugated condition – that Mirbeau consistently sought to decry with horror.”

“As the ego cogito, subjectivity is the consciousness that represents something, relates this representation back to itself, and so gathers with itself.”

“A new consciousness is developing which sees the earth as a single organism and recognizes that an organism at war with itself is doomed. We are one planet. One of the great revelations of the age of space exploration is the image of the earth finite and lonely, somehow vulnerable, bearing the entire human species through the oceans of space and time.”

“She was the subject creature, and versed in the arts of the enslaved.”

“All thought of something is at the same time self-consciousness [...] At the root of all our experiences and all our reflections, we find [...] a being which immediately recognises itself, [...] and which knows its own existence, not by observation and as a given fact, nor by inference from any idea of itself, but through direct contact with that existence. Self-consciousness is the very being of mind in action.”