Top 11 Quotes & Sayings by Emmanuel Levinas

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.

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

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.

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

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.

Politics is opposed to morality, as philosophy to naïveté.

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

For others, in spite of myself, from myself.

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

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

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