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Quote by Mattias Desmet

“The ability to empathize also plays a role in relation to our own body. Our bodies are in essence foreign to ourselves. It responds to all kinds of stimuli -food, other people, all kinds of situations- and they do so autonomously, without our knowledge of volition. We can learn to feel our body throughout our lives, for example through certain movement-based arts or meditation, by attentively observing the effects of all kinds of factors (nutrition, exercise, etc) on our body, possibly by repeatedly putting our physical experiences into words during psychoanalytic therapy. Whoever listens to his body and learns to understand its language holds the key to health. The feeling with one's own body is more important than any medicine and also more important than any "objective" rational knowledge, of for instance, healthy food.”

Quote by Mattias Desmet

Work

The Psychology of Totalitarianism

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Mattias Desmet

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“Health's not so little a thing, ' said the dust-wife. 'Compared to the alternative, anyway.' Marra's lip curled. 'She might have wished us safe,' she growled. 'Or at least that we wouldn't marry someone who'd murder us.' 'She might have,' said the dust-wife. 'But parents object to people making pronouncements like that at christenings, for some odd reason.”