Philosophy Quotes

"Desire is not a lack to be fulfilled; it is an infinite reaching."

"The totalizing systems of philosophy conceal the ethical relation they obscure."

"The self discovers itself only through its obligation to the other."

"The face commands me before any conscious decision."

"My identity is not my possession but my debt to the other."

"Being itself is justified only through ethical responsibility."

"Desire for the infinite is desire for what will never satisfy me."

"Insomnia is the vigilant consciousness that cannot rest in being."

"The self experiences itself as persecuted by the other's exteriority."

"Being is justified through service, not through truth."

"Subjectivity is the capacity to be affected by what is infinitely other."

"To exist is to bear witness to what transcends existence."

"The subject is constituted through its renunciation of totality."

"A man should so live as if he were already dead."

"I am told that I am a pessimist, but I do not think that I am. I think that the world is a very dark place, and that the future is very uncertain."

"I wish to propose for the reader's favourable consideration a doctrine which may, I fear, appear wildly paradoxical and subversive."

"The question of free will is a very difficult one."

"If I were to suggest that between the Earth and Mars there is a china teapot revolving about the sun, no one would be able to disprove my assertion."

"All movements go too far."

"We are all prone to the belief that the universe must conform to our comfort."

"The disaster is that which cannot be experienced; it is that which withdraws from experience itself."

"The night is what cannot be illuminated by reason."

"The fragment speaks more profoundly than the whole."

"To exist is to be implicated in the suffering of others."

"The disaster is banal; it happens daily without recognition."

"Language is the space where we are always already lost."

"The night is not merely absence of light; it is presence of depth."

"The night of thought precedes all day-thinking."

"The disaster arrives like a thief, taking what we did not know we had."

"The fragment speaks the truth that wholeness cannot."