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

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.

I attribute the little I know to my not having been ashamed to ask for information, and to my rule of conversing with all descriptions of men on those topics that form their own peculiar professions and pursuits.

A drinker has a hole under his nose that all his money runs into.

When I'm onstage they know I'm honest, and I try to be as humble as I can.

Considering the greater amounts of energy which can be collected and stored in suitable experimental form in capacitors, one could expect to deliver radiated energy for some time from them.

Feeling grateful or appreciative of someone or something in your life actually attracts more of the things that you appreciate and value into your life.

I think of prayer as a spiritual lifeline back to where I most want to be.

I give the name of cosmic sense to the more or less confused affinity that binds us psychologically to the All which envelops us. The existence of this feeling is indubitable, and apparently as old as the beginning of thought... The cosmic sense must have been born as soon as man found himself facing the forest, the sea and the stars.

In my experience, if you have to keep the lavatory door shut by extending your left leg, it's modern architecture.

Most people who have encountered mercury have done so after breaking a mercury thermometer. And many of us who saw the liquid balls of mercury scatter across a floor or countertop considered the element the most beautiful on the periodic table.

Let's set aside our political and ideological differences and take a moment to love our families, hug our children, parents and grandparents and through love and respect, strengthen the bonds that made us the greatest nation on Earth.

I believe you mother everybody, not in a cloying, hovering way, but taking care of what is around you.

It's not a bad thing fighting for equality and helping the poor. It's not a bad thing to have on your professional tombstone: 'He believed in equality and he helped the poor.'

Let not your love become attachment, nor your hate become destruction.

The thing I really love about film is there's a really big sense of teamwork, and everyone has to do their job to the best of their ability to make the film work in the first place.

I was a war correspondent in Korea. I did a book on it: 'This is War.'