“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.”

Language transcends us and yet we speak.

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.

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.

I think you can give meaning to any condition; you can be poor or unsuccessful or be so-called successful. But I don’t think that it would give an individual human being a better condition.

An endless, meaningless string of apologies signals a failure to change one’s own behavior. What matters is not whether the person was authentic or really meant it in those passionate expressions of remorse. All that counts is whether that person follows through so there is no repeat performance.

It don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing.

Don’t chase what brings anxiety in the equation of your life.

What does music mean to you? What would you do without music?

If human rights are supposed to have any meaning, then they have to be discussed openly.

Islam is a way of life which opens the heart to the meaning of existence.

A believer is someone who senses a consciousness or a direction and believes in it. The one who searches for meaning has not found the direction yet.