Levinas’ Interview with Francois Poirie in Is it Righteous to Be?: Interviews with Emmanuel Lévinas
Tag: ethics
It is a fault to wish to be understood before we have made ourselves clear to ourselves.
Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace
Love’s Grateful Striving: A Commentary on Kierkegaard’s Works of Love by M. Jamie Ferreira
Whoever takes up the sword shall perish by the sword. And whoever does not take up the sword (or lets it go) shall perish on the cross.
Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace
The sin in me says ‘I’. Evil makes distinctions, prevents God from being equivalent to all
Simone Weil
We console ourselves with fantasies of bouncing back but we must hold on to what has really happened and not cover it with imagining how we are to unhappen it. Void makes loss a reality.
Iris Murdoch, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, 502–3.
I must not forget that at certain times when my headaches were raging I had an intense longing to make another human being suffer by hitting him in exactly the same part of his forehead.
Simone Weil, Gravity & Grace
[The void is] the anguished experience of lack of balance. We have been unjustly treated, insulted, humiliated: we want to get our own back, to get even, if need be to hurt innocent people as we have been hurt.
Iris Murdoch, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (New York: Penguin Books, 1992), 502.
To us a single act of injustice – cheating in business, exploitation of the poor – is slight; to the prophet, a disaster. To us, injustice is injurious to the welfare of the people; to the prophet, it is a deathblow to existence; to us, an episode; to them, a catastrophe, a threat to the world.
Abraham Heschel, The Prophets
An act of hospitality can only be poetic.
Jacques Derrida (via ecrituria)
In love, the lovers do not succeed in coinciding with each other, so to speak. Fashionable sadness! Love, however, is the proximity of the other—where the other remains other. I think that when the other is ‘always other,’ there is the essence of love.
Emmanuel Levinas, from an interview with Francois Poirie, Is It Righteous to Be? Interviews with Emmanuel Levinas (via ecrituria)
Little Bristling Soul 