“Speech is not a means in the service of an external end. It contains its own rule of usage, ethics, and view of the world, as a gesture sometimes bears the whole truth about a man.”

The phenomenological world is not the bringing to explicit expression of a pre-existing being, but the laying down of being. Philosophy is not the reflection of a pre-existing truth, but, like art, the act of bringing truth into being.

The child lives in a world which he unhesitatingly believes accessible to all around him.

The perceived world is the always-presupposed foundation of all rationality, all value, and all existence.

Nothing determines me from outside, not because nothing acts upon me, but, on the contrary, because I am from the start outside myself and open to the world.

We should be sensitive to the thread of silence from which the tissue of speech is woven.

Like the weaver, the writer works on the wrong side of his material. He has only to do with the language, and it is thus that he suddenly finds himself surrounded by sense.

My own words take me by surprise and teach me what to think.

The body is our general medium for having a world.

Machiavelli is the complete contrary of a machiavellian, since he describes the tricks of power and gives the whole show away. The seducer and the politician, who live in the dialectic and have a feeling and instinct for it, try their best to keep it hidden.

Language transcends us and yet we speak.

Because we are in the world, we are condemned to meaning, and we cannot do or say anything without its acquiring a name in history.

The philosopher will ask himself if the criticism we are now suggesting is not the philosophy which presses to the limit that criticism of false gods which Christianity has introduced into our history.

I discover vision, not as a ‘thinking about seeing,’ to use Descartes expression, but as a gaze at grips with a visible world, and that is why for me there can be another’s gaze.

Visible and mobile, my body is a thing among things; it’s caught in the fabric of the world, and its cohesion is that of a thing. But, because it moves itself and sees, it holds things in a circle around itself.

The world is the natural setting of, and field for, all my thoughts and all my explicit perceptions. Truth does not inhabit only the inner man, or more accurately, there is no inner man, man is in the world, and only in the world does he know himself.

I will never know how you see red and you will never know how I see it. But this separation of consciousness is recognized only after a failure of communication, and our first movement is to believe in an undivided being between us.

When I tried to play characters that strayed from who I am it ended in disaster. People didn’t expect me in comedies or musicals.

The aim of critique is not the ends of man or of reason but in the end the Overman, the overcome, overtaken man. The point of critique is not justification but a different way of feeling: another sensibility.

Victory is for those who can say “Victory is mine”. Success is for those who can begin saying “I will succeed” and say “I have succeeded” in the end.

The films I do always have a happy ending. I hope it reflects back to real life.

In the end, I still have the same hope as my father – that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the last word.

In love as in speculation there is much filth; in love also, people think only of their own gratification; yet without love there would be no life, and the world would come to an end.

After all, what was more important, in the end, than love?

I’m the end of the line; absurd and appalling as it may seem, serious New York theater has died in my lifetime.