128 Quotes by Jacques Derrida

No one gets angry at a mathematician or a physicist whom he or she doesn't understand, or at someone who speaks a foreign language, but rather at someone who tampers with your own language.

I do not believe in pure idioms. I think there is naturally a desire, for whoever speaks or writes, to sign in an idiomatic, irreplaceable manner.

I became the stage for the great argument between Nietzsche and Rousseau. I was the extra ready to take on all the roles.

Who ever said that one was born just once?

I have always had school sickness, as others have seasickness. I cried when it was time to go back to school long after I was old enough to be ashamed of such behavior.

I never give in to the temptation to be difficult just for the sake of being difficult. That would be too ridiculous.

The circle of the return to birth can only remain open, but this is a chance, a sign of life, and a wound.

Why is it the philosopher who is expected to be easier and not some scientist who is even more inaccessible?

Still today, I cannot cross the threshold of a teaching institution without physical symptoms, in my chest and my stomach, of discomfort or anxiety. And yet I have never left school.