17 Quotes by Emmanuel Levinas

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

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

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

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.

To approach the Other in conversation is to welcome his expression, in which at each instant he overflows the idea a thought would carry away from it. It is therefore to receive from the Other beyond the capacity of the I, which means exactly: to have the idea of infinity. But it also means: to be taught.

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.

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.

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.