Home › Authors › Emmanuel Levinas
Emmanuel Levinas Quotes
1906–1995 France
Emmanuel Levinas (French pronunciation: [leviˈna, leviˈnas]; 12 January 1906 – 25 December 1995) was a French philosopher and Talmudic commentator of Lithuanian Jewish origin.
France Academics Historians Non-fiction authors Philosophers Random Emmanuel Levinas quote
11 quotes
Fear for the Other, fear for the other man's death is my fear, but is in no way an individual's taking fright.
To ignore the true God is in fact only half an evil; atheism is worth more than the piety bestowed on mythical gods.
A Religion for Adults (1957)
The peace of empires issued from war rests on war. It does not restore to the alienated beings their lost identity.
Totality and Infinity (1961)
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.
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.
Totality and Infinity (1961)
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?
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.
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.
Topics Emmanuel Levinas is quoted on
Works