“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.”

The world is the natural setting of, and field for, all my thoughts and all my explicit perceptions.

We know not through our intellect but through our experience.

Montaigne puts not self-satisfied understanding but a consciousness astonished at itself at the core of human existence.

The body is to be compared, not to a physical object, but rather to a work of art.

I live in the facial expressions of the other, as I feel him living in mine.

The photograph keeps open the instants which the onrush of time closes up forthwith; it destroys the overtaking, the overlapping, the metamorphosis of time.

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.

I am not in front of my body, I am in it or rather I am it… If we can still speak of interpretation in relation to the perception of one’s own body, we shall have to say that it interprets itself.

The number and richness of man’s signifiers always surpasses the set of defined objects that could be termed signifieds. The symbolic function must always precede its object and does not encounter reality except when it precedes it into the imaginary.

We must therefore rediscover, after the natural world, the social world, not as an object or sum of objects, but as a permanent field or dimension of existence.

The sensate body possesses an art of interrogating the sensible according to its own wishes, an inspired exegesis.

The world is nothing but ‘world-as-meaning.

It is the mission of the twentieth century to elucidate the irrational.

Our body is not in space like things; it inhabits or haunts space. It applies itself to space like a hand to an instrument. And when we wish to move about, we do not move the body as we move an object.

Everyone is alone and yet nobody can do without other people, not just because they are useful but also when it comes to happiness.

Socrates reminds us that it is not the same thing, but almost the opposite, to understand religion and to accept it.

Every piece of music is a form of personal expression for its creator. If a work doesn’t express the composers own personal point of view, his own ideas, then it doesn’t, in my opinion, even deserve to be born.

To live life well is to express life poorly; if one expresses life too well, one is living it no longer.

The sum of human wisdom is not contained in any one language, and no single language is capable of expressing all forms and degrees of human comprehension.

It is no longer possible for lyric poetry to express the immensity of our experience. Life has grown too cumbersome, too complicated. We have acquired values which are best expressed in prose.

We are never real historians, but always near poets, and our emotion is perhaps nothing but an expression of a poetry that was lost.

I don’t see why it’s impossible to express everything that’s on one’s mind.

A man of genius has a right to any mode of expression.

Love is never finished expressing itself, and it expresses itself better the more poetically it is dreamed.