“It’s to me this evening something has to happen, to my body as in myth and metamorphosis, this old body to which nothing ever happened, or so little, which never met with anything, wished for anything, in its tarnished universe, except for the mirrors to shatter, the plane, the curved, the magnifying, the minifying, and to vanish in the havoc of its images.”

Michel Henry, Incarnation. Une philosophie de la chair, éd. du Seuil, 2000, p. 221
Books on Religion and Christianity, Incarnation: A philosophy of Flesh (2000)
Original: (fr) Ma chair n’est donc pas seulement le principe de la constitution de mon corps objectif, elle cache en elle sa substance invisible. Telle est l’étrange condition de cet objet que nous appelons un corps : il ne consiste nullement en ces espèces visibles auxquelles on le réduit depuis toujours ; en sa réalité précisément il est invisible. Personne n’a jamais vu un homme, mais personne n’a jamais vu non plus son corps, si du moins par « corps » on entend son corps réel.

Radio From Hell (November 13, 2006)

Ch III : The Tool
Variant translation of: <span id="perfection"></span>Il semble que la perfection soit atteinte non quand il n'y a plus rien à ajouter, mais quand il n'y a plus rien à retrancher.
Ch. III: L'Avion <!-- p. 60 -->
It seems that perfection is attained not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing more to remove.
Terre des Hommes (1939)
Context: Have you looked at a modern airplane? Have you followed from year to year the evolution of its lines? Have you ever thought, not only about the airplane but about whatever man builds, that all of man's industrial efforts, all his computations and calculations, all the nights spent over working draughts and blueprints, invariably culminate in the production of a thing whose sole and guiding principle is the ultimate principle of simplicity?
It is as if there were a natural law which ordained that to achieve this end, to refine the curve of a piece of furniture, or a ship's keel, or the fuselage of an airplane, until gradually it partakes of the elementary purity of the curve of a human breast or shoulder, there must be the experimentation of several generations of craftsmen. In anything at all, perfection is finally attained not when there is no longer anything to add, but when there is no longer anything to take away, when a body has been stripped down to its nakedness.

Source: Meditations (c. 121–180 AD), Book X, 6

Source: Where Dreams Begin