Levinas Quotes & Sayings

The "small goodness" from one person to his fellowman is lost and deformed as soon as it seeks organization and universality and system, as soon as it opts for doctrine, a treatise of politics and theology, a party, a state, and even a church. Yet it remains the sole refuge of the good in being. Unbeaten, it undergoes the violence of evil, which, as small goodness, it can neither vanquish nor drive out. A little kindness going only from man to man, not crossing distances to get to the places where events and forces unfold! A remarkable utopia of the good or the secret of its beyond. — Emmanuel Levinas

I will say this quite plainly, what truly human is -and don't be afraid of this word- love. And I mean it even with everything that burdens love or, i could say it better, responsibility is actually love, as Pascal said: 'without concupiscence' [without lust] ... love exists without worrying being loved. — Emmanuel Levinas

One can like one's job, enjoy these material gestures and the things that permit the accomplishing of them. One can transform the curse of labor into sport. Activity does not derive its value and meaning from an ultimate and unique goal [...] To enjoy without utility, in pure loss, gratuitously, without referring to anything else, in pure expenditure---this is human. — Emmanuel Levinas

Love remains a relation with the Other that turns into need, transcendent exteriority of the other, of the beloved. But love goes beyond the beloved ... The possibility of the Other appearing as an object of a need while retaining his alterity, or again,the possibility of enjoying the Other ... this simultaneity of need and desire, or concupiscence and transcendence, ... constitutes the originality of the erotic which, in this sense, is the equivocal par excellence. — Emmanuel Levinas

I'm not sure how far Derrida's later 'theological' interests are really rooted in post-structuralism or whether they don't rather reflect a kind of Kantian-Marxist trajectory - with a French twist on the centrality of liberty, equality and fraternity (cf. Politics of Friendship). Not to mention the role of Levinas and, behind Levinas, Judaism's twinning of eschatology and the call for justice. — George Pattison

This world, in which reason is more and more at home, is not habitable. It is hard and cold like those depots in which are piled up goods that cannot satisfy: neither clothe those who are naked, nor feed those who are hungry; it is as impersonal as factory hangars and industrial cities in which manufactured things remain abstract, true with statistical truth and borne on the anonymous circuit of the economy, resulting from skilful planning decisions which cannot prevent, but prepare disasters. There it is, the mind in its masculine essence, living on the outside, exposed to the violent, blinding sun, to the trade winds that beat against it and beat it down, on a land without folds, rootless, solitary and wandering and thus already alienated by the very things which it caused to be produced and which remain untameable and hostile. — Emmanuel Levinas

If one could possess, grasp, and know the other, it would not be other. — Emmanuel Levinas

In weariness, existence is like the reminder of a commitment to exist, with all the seriousness and harshness of an irrevocable contract. One has to do something, one has to aspire after and undertake [...] In weariness we want to escape existence itself, and not only one of its landscapes in a longing for more beautiful skies. An evasion without an itinerary and without an end, it is not trying to come ashore somewhere. — Emmanuel Levinas

Levinas's thought emphasizes not the primacy of the self, but the primacy of the other - that is, other human beings. He taught that the self comes into existence — Ira F. Stone

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

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

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

...philosophy permits man to interrogate himself about what he says and about what one says to oneself in thinking. No longer to let oneself be swayed or intoxicated by the rhythm of words and the generality that they designate, but to open oneself to the uniqueness of the unique in the real, that is to say, to the uniqueness of the other. That is to say, in the final analysis, to love. To speak truly, not as one sings; to awaken; to sober up; to undo one's refrain. Already the philosopher Alain taught us to be on guard against everything that in our purportedly lucid civilization comes to us from the "merchants of sleep." Philosophy as insomnia, as a new awakening at the heart of the self-evidence which already marks the awakening, but which is still or always a dream. — Emmanue Levinas

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

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

What could an entirely rational being speak of with another entirely rational being? — Emmanuel Levinas

The very relationship with the other is the relationship with the future. — Emmanuel Levinas

Positively, he [Heidegger] shows that the prospect of death doesn't of itself destroy all possibilities of meaning but calls instead for these to be relocated from fantasies about a future post-mortem life. However, I don't think he does enough in this work to show that this relocation has - I believe - a primarily ethical character (in Levinas's sense of 'ethical'). — George Pattison

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

A fine risk is always something to be taken in philosophy ... Philosophy thus arouses a drama between philosophers and an intersubjective movement which does not resemble the dialogue of teamworkers in science, nor even the Platonic dialogue which is the reminiscence of a drama rather than a drama itself. It is sketched out in a different structure; empirically it is realized as the history of philosophy in which new interlocutors always enter who have to restate, but in which the former ones take up the floor to answer in the interpretations they arouse, and in which, nonetheless, despite a lack of "certainty in one's movements" or because of it, no one is allowed a relaxation of attention or a lack of strictness. — Emmanuel Levinas

For others, in spite of myself, from myself. — Emmanuel Levinas

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 this also means: to be taught. The relation with the Other, or Conversation, is a non-allergic relation, an ethical relation; but inasmuch as it is welcomed this conversation is a teaching. Teaching is not reducible to maieutics; it comes from the exterior and brings me more than I contain. In its non-violent transitivity the very epiphany of the face is produced. — Emmanuel Levinas

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

The true life is absent.' But we are in the world. Metaphysics arises and is maintained in this alibi. — Emmanuel Levinas

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