Emmanuel Levinas Quotes

• If one could possess, grasp, and know the other, it would not be other.

  Emmanuel Levinas

  Knows, Ifs

  154 Copy quote

• The very relationship with the other is the relationship with the future.

  Emmanuel Levinas

  140 Copy quote

• Faith is not a question of the existence or non-existence of God. It is believing that love without reward is valuable.

  Emmanuel Levinas

  Believe, Rewards, Existence

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• For others, in spite of myself, from myself.

  Emmanuel Levinas

  Spite

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• Love remains a relation with the Other that turns into need, transcendent exteriority of the other, of the beloved. But love goes beyond the beloved... The possibility of the Other appearing as an object of a need while retaining his alterity, or again,the possibility of enjoying the Other... this simultaneity of need and desire, or concupiscence and transcendence,... constitutes the originality of the erotic which, in this sense, is the equivocal par excellence.

  Emmanuel Levinas

  Erotic, Excellence, Desire

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• I will say this quite plainly, what truly human is -and don't be afraid of this word- love. And I mean it even with everything that burdens love or, i could say it better, responsibility is actually love, as Pascal said: 'without concupiscence' [without lust]... love exists without worrying being loved.

  Emmanuel Levinas

  Mean, Responsibility, Worry

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• Politics is opposed to morality, as philosophy to naïveté.

  Emmanuel Levinas

  Philosophy, Vets, Morality

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• A miracle entails a degree of irrationality-not because it shocks reason, but because it makes no appeal to it.

  Emmanuel Levinas

  Miracle, Degrees, Reason

  71 Copy quote

• What could an entirely rational being speak of with another entirely rational being?

  Emmanuel Levinas

  Speak, Rational

  66 Copy quote

• Memory as an inversion of historical time is the essence of interiority.

  Emmanuel Levinas

  Memories, Essence, Historical

  50 Copy quote

• Of course we do not live in order to eat, but it is not really true to say that we eat in order to live; we eat because we are hungry. Desire has no further intentions behind it... it is a good will.

  Emmanuel Levinas

  Food, Order, Desire

  72 Copy quote

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