51 Quotes About Otherness

When words remain unspoken and emotions are left unexpressed, just a glint in the eyes from otherness can inflame the mind and rouse a shower of empathy. ("Only needed a light ")

Doesn't everyone have in them this potential change and becoming? This absolute singularity which demands only to occur effortlessly, an inspired form freed from the straitjacket of our individual being? We have this becoming within us, and we lack nothing, since we are rid of truth.The world too lacks nothing as it is; it opposes any attempt to make it signify anything whatever. To inflict truth on it is like explaining a joke or a funny story.

There is no rational commensuration between what affects us and what affects others; the first we sense physically, the other only touches us morally.

When we are looking for the unexpected, we are not only looking for the unexpected in ourselves, but we are also curious about the unexpected in the behavior of the others. So as to know the others, we have got to learn how and where they differ from us. By understanding this, we are able to establish an uplifting link with otherness. ( "Looking for the unexpected" )

[...]It is thus always by virtue of a declination of meaning, or of non-meaning, that existence takes on form - by virtue, that is, of the deflection of something else. We have no will of our own, and the other is never what we would, of our own volition, choose to confront. Rather, the other is an invasion by something from elsewhere, priority given to what comes from elsewhere, seduction by foreignness and the transmission of foreignness.

Even in the most closed cultures men believe that they are free and open to the universal; their differential character makes the narrowest cultural fields seem inexhaustible from within. Anything that compromises this illusion terrifies us and stirs up the immemorial tendency to persecution.

Me doy cuenta ahora de que el primer día apenas llegué a mirar. Creía estar mirando, pero solo estaba percibiendo un mero barrunto de lo que hay en estos cuadros. Ahora es cuando estoy empezando a mirar.

There is this question of otherness….So just as it is blood alone that binds people to defend one another in the face of danger, on the spiritual plane one person will struggle to help another only if this person is not ‘different’, and if, quite aside from opinions and convictions, they share similar natures at the deepest level.

Choosing to accept yourself is a political act. An act of liberation.