Emmanuel Levinas Quotes

#1. For others, in spite of myself, from myself.

Emmanuel Levinas

#2. Faith is not a question of the existence or non-existence of God. It is believing that love without reward is valuable.

Emmanuel Levinas

#3. Tools refer to one another to finally refer to our care for existing. In turning on a bathroom switch, we open up the entire ontological problem

Emmanuel Levinas

#4. The very relationship with the other is the relationship with the future.

Emmanuel Levinas

#5. Its strangeness is, we might say, due to its very reality, to the very fact that there is existence. The questioning of Being is an experience of Being in its strangeness

Emmanuel Levinas

#6. Memory as an inversion of historical time is the essence of interiority.

Emmanuel Levinas

#7. If one could possess, grasp, and know the other, it would not be other.

Emmanuel Levinas

#8. At the very moment when the world seems to break up we still take it seriously and perform reasonable acts and undertakings, the condemned man still drinks his glass of rum. To call it everyday and condemn it as inauthentic is to fail to recognize the sincerity of hunger and thirst

Emmanuel Levinas

#9. We breathe for the sake of breathing, eat and drink for the sake of eating and drinking, we take shelter for the sake of taking shelter, we study to satisfy our curiosity, we take a walk for the walk. All that's not for the sake of living, it is living. Life is a sincerity.

Emmanuel Levinas

#10. The true life is absent.' But we are in the world. Metaphysics arises and is maintained in this alibi.

Emmanuel Levinas

#11. Of course we do not live in order to eat, but it is not really true to say that we eat in order to live; we eat because we are hungry. Desire has no further intentions behind it ... it is a good will.

Emmanuel Levinas

#12. A miracle entails a degree of irrationality-not because it shocks reason, but because it makes no appeal to it.

Emmanuel Levinas

#13. What could an entirely rational being speak of with another entirely rational being?

Emmanuel Levinas