Levinas, Emmanuel

"Patience is the temporal form of ethical obligation."

"The self cannot be sovereign when truly facing the Other."

"What remains unsaid is often more important than what is spoken."

"The Other's question of me is more fundamental than my question of them."

"Generosity is the recognition that all we have is the Other's."

"Suffering teaches us the infinite nature of obligation."

"The trace indicates what has passed beyond being."

"Justice requires infinite patience and finite decision."

"The ethical relation cannot be universalized without betraying itself."

"To speak is already to respond to the Other."

"Being human means being called to an impossible responsibility."

"The face of the poor and widow commands me absolutely."

"Indifference to the Other's suffering is complicity in violence."

"Time opens not as history but as the approach of the Other."

"The self is a hostage to the Other, and this is our dignity."

"To love is to will the good of the Other without return."

"Ethics is the response to being chosen without having chosen."

"The Other cannot be totalized into a system of comprehension."

"Consciousness is always consciousness of something, but ethics is consciousness of Someone."

"The widow, the orphan, and the stranger embody alterity."

"We must speak of what we cannot speak, think of what eludes thought."

"The ethical is not a region of being but the very meaning of meaning."

"Forgiveness is always excessive, disproportionate to the offense."

"The Other teaches me before I teach myself."

"Being is contingent, finite, and dependent upon alterity."

"The ethical command is silent yet impossibly loud."

"Language is the first violence, but ethical language resists this violence."

"To be is to be responsible before any choice of responsibility."

"The Other's look judges me before I judge myself."

"Community begins with the ethical relation to the singular Other."