“My own words take me by surprise and teach me what to think.”

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.

Thinking which displaces, or otherwise defines, the sacred has been called atheistic, and that philosophy which does not place it here or there, like a thing, but at the joining of things and words, will always be exposed to this reproach without ever being touched by it.

The flesh is at the heart of the world.

Our own body is in the world as the heart is in the organism: it keeps the visible spectacle constantly alive, it breathes life into it and sustains it inwardly, and with it forms a system.

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

To understand is to experience harmony between what we aim at and what is given, between the intention and the performance – and the body is our anchorage in the world.

I may speak many languages, but there remains one in which I live.

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

We have too many high-sounding words, and too few actions that correspond with them.

Don’t get angry. Try not to speak roughly or use harsh words.

May your thoughts, words and actions arise from love.

My Dear Son… remember that you are accountable to your Maker for all your words and actions.

In a sense, words are encyclopedias of ignorance because they freeze perceptions at one moment in history and then insist we continue to use these frozen perceptions when we should be doing better.

The act of writing itself is much like the construction of a mirror made of words.

Godliness is more easily feigned in words than in actions.

And other facets of human existence. Looking in certain other corners of the same mirror, he or she may experience glimpses of a True Self sheltered deftly behind a mask of public proprieties.