" For the disciplined man, as for the true believer, no detail is unimportant, but not so much for the meaning that it conceals within it as for the hold it provides for the power that wishes to seize it. Characteristic is the great hymn to the 'little things' and to their eternal importance, sung by Jean Baptiste de La Salle, in his "Traité sur les obligations des freres des Ecoles chretienne" (Treaty on the obligations of the Brothers of the Christian Schools). The mystique of the everyday is joined here with the discipline of the minute. 'How dangerous it is to neglect little things. It is a very consoling reflection for a soul like mine, little disposed to great actions, to think that fidelity to little things may, by an imperceptible progress, raise us to the most eminent sanctity: because little things lead to greater . . . Little things; it will be said, alas, my God, what can we do that is great for you, weak and mortal creatures that we are. Little things; if great things presented themselves would we perform them! Would we not think them beyond our strength! Little things; and if God accepts them and wishes to receive them as great things! Little things; has one ever felt this? Does one judge according to experience? Little things; one is certainly guilty, therefore, of seeing them as such, one refuses them! Little things; yet it is they that in the end have made great saints! Yes, little things; but great motives, great feelings, great fervour, great ardour, and consequently great merits, great treasures, great rewards! (La Salle). The meticulousness of the regulations, the fussiness of the inspections, the supervision of the smallest fragment of life and of the body - will soon provide, in the context of the school, the barracks, the hospital or the workshop, a laicized content, an economic or technical rationality for this mystical calculus of the infinitesimal and the infinite. "
― Michel Foucault , Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison