“It is a great good fortune, as Stendhal said, for one “to have his passion as a profession.”

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.

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.

You are sad in the midst of every blessing. Take care that Fortune does not observe–or she will call you ungrateful.

As the blessings of health and fortune have a beginning, so they must also find an end. Everything rises but to fall, and increases but to decay.

But assuredly Fortune rules in all things; she raised to eminence or buries in oblivion everything from caprice rather than from well-regulated principle.

Fortune gives many too much, but none enough.

Fortune gives too much to many, enough to none.

Nothing is more dangerous to men than a sudden change of fortune.

Fortune rules in all things, and advances and depresses things more out of her own will than right and justice.

Sovereignty is easily preserved by the very arts by which it was originally created. When, however, energy has given place to indifference, and temperance and justice to passion and arrogance, then as the morals change so changes fortune.