“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 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.

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.

I find men’s clothing fascinating because sometime between, say, 1930 and 1936 a handful of basic shapes were created and still prevail as a sort of scale of expression, with which every man can project his own personality and his own dignity.

Francis Galton, whose mission it seems to be to ride other men’s hobbies to death, has invented the felicitous expression ‘structureless germs’.

Each victim of suicide gives his act a personal stamp which expresses his temperament, the special conditions in which he is involved, and which, consequently, cannot be explained by the social and general causes of the phenomenon.

Here’s a nation, one of the founding pillars was freedom of speech and freedom of expression. And yet, we have imposed upon people restrictions on what they can say, on what they can think. And the media is the largest proponent of this, crucifying people who say things really quite innocently.

If you don’t like someone’s story, write your own. If you don’t like what somebody says, say what it is you don’t like.

Religious representations are collective representations which express collective realities.

Some have expressed the very opposite feeling–the fear that they would not be interesting enough to write about.

City of prose and fantasy, of capitalist automation, its streets a triumph of cubism, its moral philosophy that of the dollar. New York impressed me tremendously because, more than any other city, it is the fullest expression of our modern age.