“It is the essence of certainty to be established only with reservations.”

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.

To ask for an explanation is to explain the obscure by the more obscure.

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.

There’s something special about racing in real streets. The ‘artificial’ circuits have a certain sameness to them.

Certain things just happen and it’s undeniable, you just go that way. But I don’t have a specific path I’m following, I’m just playing it by ear.

Through perseverance many people win success out of what seemed destined to be certain failure.

A farewell is necessary before you can meet again. And meeting again, after moments or lifetimes, is certain for those who are friends.

Don’t turn away from possible futures before you’re certain you don’t have anything to learn from them.

No wind serves him who addresses his voyage to no certain port.

All men having power ought to be distrusted to a certain degree.

It is certain that the study of human psychology, if it were undertaken exclusively in prisons, would also lead to misrepresentation and absurd generalizations.