I do not believe in pure idioms. I think there is naturally a desire, for whoever speaks or writes, to sign in an idiomatic, irreplaceable manner.

I do everything I think possible or acceptable to escape from this trap.

I have always had school sickness, as others have seasickness. I cried when it was time to go back to school long after I was old enough to be ashamed of such behavior.

We are all mediators, translators.

Whatever precautions you take so the photograph will look like this or that, there comes a moment when the photograph surprises you. It is the other's gaze that wins out and decides.

The circle of the return to birth can only remain open, but this is a chance, a sign of life, and a wound.

These critics organize and practice in my case a sort of obsessive personality cult which philosophers should know how to question and above all, to moderate.

The boarding-school experience in Paris was very hard, I didn't put up with it very well. I was sick all the time, or in any case frail, on the edge of a nervous breakdown.

The first problem of the media is posed by what does not get translated, or even published in the dominant political languages.

In philosophy, you have to reckon with the implicit level of an accumulated reserve, and thus with a very great number of relays, with the shared responsibility of these relays.

I became the stage for the great argument between Nietzsche and Rousseau. I was the extra ready to take on all the roles.

To pretend, I actually do the thing: I have therefore only pretended to pretend.

Who ever said that one was born just once?

My most resolute opponents believe that I am too visible, that I am a little too alive, that my name echoes too much in the texts which they nevertheless claim to be inaccessible.

Why is it the philosopher who is expected to be easier and not some scientist who is even more inaccessible?

Every discourse, even a poetic or oracular sentence, carries with it a system of rules for producing analogous things and thus an outline of methodology.

As soon as there is language, generality has entered the scen.

In Algeria, I had begun to get into literature and philosophy. I dreamed of writing-and already models were instructing the dream, a certain language governed it.

I wrote some bad poetry that I published in North African journals, but even as I withdrew into this reading, I also led the life of a kind of young hooligan.

If this work seems so threatening, this is because it isn't simply eccentric or strange, but competent, rigorously argued, and carrying conviction.

These years of the Ecole Normale were an ordeal. Nothing was handed to me on the first try.

I have always had trouble recognizing myself in the features of the intellectual playing his political role according to the screenplay that you are familiar with and whose heritage deserves to be questioned.

No one gets angry at a mathematician or a physicist whom he or she doesn't understand, or at someone who speaks a foreign language, but rather at someone who tampers with your own language.

I do not believe in pure idioms. I think there is naturally a desire, for whoever speaks or writes, to sign in an idiomatic, irreplaceable manner.

I never give in to the temptation to be difficult just for the sake of being difficult. That would be too ridiculous.

Certain readers resented me when they could no longer recognize their territory, their institution.

Still today, I cannot cross the threshold of a teaching institution without physical symptoms, in my chest and my stomach, of discomfort or anxiety. And yet I have never left school.

Everything is arranged so that it be this way, this is what is called culture.

As soon as there is language, generality has entered the scene.

The end approaches, but the apocalypse is long lived.

The circle of the return to birth can only remain open but this is a chance a sign of life and a wound.

Everything is arranged so that it be this way this is what is called culture.

Speech is a text, gesture is a text, reality is a text in this new sense. This is not about re-establishing graphocentrism alongside logocentrism or phonocentrism or text-centrism. The text is not a centre. The text is an openness without borders, of ever-differentiating references.

Psychoanalysis has taught that the dead -- a dead parent, for example -- can be more alive for us, more powerful, more scary, than the living. It is the question of ghosts.

The desire for liberty has also made itself felt as struggle against domestic tyranny or arbitrary rule.

I want the municipality to be a helping hand to the man with a desire of sympathy, to help the fallen when it is not in their power to help themselves.

A desire to be observed, considered, esteemed, praised, beloved, and admired by his fellows is one of the earliest as well as the keenest dispositions discovered in the heart of man.

We have no desire to convince anyone that there is only one way by which faith can be acquired.

But the deep desire for peace remained with the American people.

I have known more men destroyed by the desire to have wife and child and to keep them in comfort than I have seen destroyed by drink and harlots.

It was also during my tenure of office that the Japanese Government agreed to the conclusion of a Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and signed it, pursuing a policy in harmony with the avowed desire of the people.

'Tis very certain the desire of life prolongs it.

One of the things that has always motivated me to write is the desire to get it out and look at it in an objective way, so that it doesn't cause me any serious pain by staying inside.

In human history, the desire for revenge and the desire for loot have often been closely associated.

I see Canada as a country torn between a very northern, rather extraordinary, mystical spirit which it fears and its desire to present itself to the world as a Scotch banker.

To be happy at home is the ultimate result of all ambition, the end to which every enterprise and labor tends, and of which every desire prompts the prosecution.

The genius of the economic machine is in its ability to convert these indulgences into profitability. It converts desire into attention, a grip on our eyeballs and eardrums, which in turn can be marketed to advertisers.

I don't know what keeps me going. Sometimes I wonder... I think it's just pure perseverance and wanting to succeed and having that burning desire to always have success.

If history and science have taught us anything, it is that passion and desire are not the same as truth.