23 Quotes About The-other

One writes because one has been touched by the yearning for and the despair of ever touching the Other.

The relation to the other is not epistemological, but ethical, and the whole attempt to accomodate or account for the other within the confines of my experience already constitutes a breach of this fundamental ethical relation. The other is precisely that which cannot be the object of my experience in the sense of being completely manifest within it, and so cannot be construed as a phenomenon at all.

While most of our major religions acknowledge the truth of universal brotherhood, too many human beings are still hanging on to their hate and fear of "the other." We have created our own misery. We can also heal ourselves through kindness, cooperation, compassion, generosity, forgiveness, honesty, understanding and sacrifice. The choice is ours.

If the Epic of Gilgamesh carries a teaching, it is that the other makes our existence possible.

What the poet tells us is that, after the ordeals and adventures, after the revelation and the loss, the king must do two things: preserve the splendor of his city and tell his own story. Both tasks are complementary: both speak of the intimate connection between building a city of walls and building a story of words, and both require, in order to be accomplished, the existence of the other.

Of course, my mother is her own person. Of course, she contains multitudes. She reacts in ways that surprise me, in part, simply because she isn't me. I forget this and relearn it anew because it's a lesson that doesn't, that can't, stick. I know her only as she is defined against me, so when I see her as herself, like when she gets catcalled on the street, there's dissonance…

Love ~ Truth ~ Freedom are three words that mean the same, and none may exist without the other present.

I say this because there was a seriousness about her that seemed almost like a kind of anger. As though she might say, "I came here from whatever unspeakable distance and from whatever unimaginable otherness just to oblige your prayers. Now say something with a little meaning in it.

From Hinduism to the monotheisms through to Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, the common message is that we are all, naturally and potentially, inclined to reject the other, and to be intolerant and racist. Left to our own devices and our own emotions, we can be deaf, blind, dogmatic, closed and xenophobic: we are not born open-minded, respectful and pluralist. We become so through personal effort, education, self-mastery and knowledge.