When ethics thus moves into the domain of politics and becomes morality, the possibility of violence appears because of the threat of the application of such absolutist forms of thought. Further, although the moral agent must remain free in order to avoid the totalizing domination of the state, morality must still be grounded in the ethical relation of the face-to-face.

Fear for the Other, fear for the other man's death is my fear, but is in no way an individual's taking fright.

The detour to ideality leads to coinciding with oneself, that is, to certainty, which remains the guide and guarantee of the whole spiritual adventure of being.

To ignore the true God is in fact only half an evil; atheism is worth more than the piety bestowed on mythical gods.

The mores I return to myself, the more I divest myself, under the traumatic effect of persecution , of my freedom as a constituted, wilful, imperialistic subject, the more I discover myself to be responsible' the more just I am, the more guilty I am. I am 'in myself' through others.

The moral consciousness can sustain the mocking gaze of the political man only if the certitude of peace dominates the evidence of war. Such a certitude is not obtained by a simple play of antitheses. The peace of empires issued from war rests on war. It does not restore to the alienated beings their lost identity. For that a primordial and original relation with being is needed.

The ego involved in responsibility is me and no one else, me with whom one whould have liked to pair up a sister soul, from whom one would have substitution and sacrifice.

The comprehension of God taken as a participation in his sacred life, an allegedly direct comprehension, is impossible, because participation is a denial of the divine, and because nothing is more direct than the face to face, which is straightforwardness itself.

The theory of transparency was set up in reaction to the theory of mental images, of an inner tableu which the perception of an object would leave in us. In imagination our gaze always goes outward, but imagination modifies and neutralizes the gaze: the real world appears in it as it were between parenthesis or quote marks.

By asserting the objectivity of the physical world, naturalism identifies the existence and the conditions of existence of the physical world with existence and the conditions of existence in general. It forgets that the world of the physicist necessarily refers back, through its intrinsic meaning, through the subjective world which one tries to exclude from reality as being pure appearance, conditioned by the empirical nature of man, which is incapable of reaching directly to a world of things in themselves. But while the world of the physicist claims to go beyond naive experience, his world really exists only in relation to naive experience.

To be or not to be is not the question where transcendence is concerned. The statement of being's other, of the otherwise than being, claims to state a difference over and beyond that which separates being from nothingness - the very difference of the beyond, the difference of transcendence.

The transition of the subject-object relation to that of the I-Thou implies a passage of consciousness to a new sphere of existence, viz, the interval, betweenness or Zwischen; and this is a passage from thought to Umfassung.

If every pure character in the Old Testament announces the Messiah, if every unworthy person is his torturer and every woman his Mother, does not the Book of Books lose all life with this obsessive theme? On the doctrine of prefiguration.

How many disappointments are conducive to bitterness? One or a thousand, depending on the subject.

In order to deceive melancholy, you must keep moving. Once you stop, it wakens, if in fact it has ever dozed off.

To read is to let someone else work for you - the most delicate form of exploitation.

I love talking to simple people, with common folk, if you like, and I still do it and still chat now as before with anyone, regardless of intellectual level. On the contrary, I like uneducated people much better and that is obviously my Rumanian heritage.

My mission is to see things as they are. Exactly the contrary of a mission.

Dead of night. No one, nothing but the society of the moments. Each pretends to keep us company, then escapes - desertion after desertion.

I'd rather offer my life as a sacrifice than be necessary to anything.

A person who wakes up after a night of unbroken sleep has the illusion of beginning something new. When one instead remains awake the whole night long, nothing new begins.

Love's great (and sole) originality is to make happiness indistinct from misery.

Our place is somewhere between being and nonbeing - between two fictions.

What I know wreaks havoc upon what I want.

To think is to submit to the whims and commands of an uncertain health.

When you get over an infatuation, to fall for someone ever again seems so inconceivable that you imagine no one, not even a bug, that is not mired in disappointment.

One would have to be as unenlightened as an angel or an idiot to imagine that the human escapade could turn out well.

Impossible for me to know whether or not I take myself seriously. The drama of detachment is that we cannot measure its progress. We advance into a desert, and we never know where we are in it.

Lucidity is not necessarily compatible with life, actually not at all.

Opinions, yes; convictions, no. That is the point of departure for an intellectual pride.

If to describe a misery were as easy to live through it!

By virtue of depression, we recall those misdeeds we buried in the depths of our memory. Depression exhumes our shames.

Who does not believe in Fate proves that he has not lived.

When you love someone, you hope - the more closely to be attached - that a catastrophe will strike your beloved.

Never unreal, Pain is a challenge to the universal fiction. What luck to be the only sensation granted a content, if not a meaning!

Of all that makes us suffer, nothing - so much as disappointment - gives us the sensation of at last touching Truth.

Basically-I speak of life as it is and not of abstract philosophical constructs-life is only bearable because one does not go to the end; doing something is only possible when one has particular illusions and that holds also for friendships, for everything.

What is not heartrending is superfluous, at least in music.

What is marvelous is that each day brings us a new reason to disappear.

This morning I thought, hence lost my bearings, for a good quarter of an hour.

Is it conceivable to adhere to a religion founded by someone else?

To be or not to be...Neither one nor the other.

I anticipated witnessing in my lifetime the disappearance of our species. But the Gods have been against me.

When we have no further desire to show ourselves, we take refuge in music, the Providence of the abulic.

Melancholy redeems this universe, and yet it is melancholy that separates us from it.

Boredom is connected naturally with time, with the horror of time, with the experience and the consciousness of time. Those who are not aware of time do not become bored. Basically life is only possible if one is not aware of time. If one should happen to want to experience consciously one of those moments that pass, one would be lost; life would become unbearable.

What a judgment upon the living, if it is true, as has been maintained, that what dies has never existed!

Since the only things we remember are humiliations and defeats, what is the use of all the rest?

Only what we have not accomplished and what we could not accomplish matters to us, so that what remains of a whole life is only what it will not have been.

The world begins and ends with us. Only our consciousness exists, it is everything, and this everything vanishes with it. Dying, we leave nothing. Then why so much fuss around an event that is no such thing?