Philosophers

“Il faut imaginer Sisyphe heureux.”

“One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”

“Sono pessimista con l'intelligenza, ma ottimista per la volontà.”

“I'm a pessimist because of intelligence, but an optimist because of will.”

“ἄνθρωπος φύσει πολιτικὸν ζῷον”

“Man is by nature a political animal.”

“Die Welt ist meine Vorstellung.”

“The world is my representation.”

“The highest activity a human being can attain is learning for understanding, because to understand is to be free.”

“The point of philosophy is to start with something so simple as not to seem worth stating, and to end with something so paradoxical that no one will believe it.”

“Wir leben heute in einer Welt, die sehr arm an Unterbrechung ist; das „Zwischen" und die „Zwischenzeiten" verschwinden.”

“Today, we live in a world that is very poor in interruption; "betweenness" and "between-times" are disappearing.”

“不闻不若闻之，闻之不若见之，见之不若知之，知之不若行之。”

“I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand.”

“Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.”

“Le visage d'autrui détruit à tout moment et déborde l'image plastique qu'il me laisse.”

“The face of the Other at each moment destroys and overflows the plastic image it leaves me, the idea existing to my own measure and to the measure of its ideatum — the adequate idea.”

“Οὐδεὶς ἐλεύθερος ὃς ἑαυτοῦ μὴ κρατεῖ.”

“No man is free who is not master of himself.”

“Je höher wir uns erheben, desto kleiner erscheinen wir denen, die nicht fliegen können.”

“The higher we soar, the smaller we appear to those who cannot fly.”

“Das Wahre ist das Ganze. Das Ganze aber ist nur das durch seine Entwicklung sich vollendende Wesen.”

“The truth is the whole. But the whole is nothing other than the essence consummating itself through its development.”

“Je fais, défais et refais mes concepts à partir d'un horizon mouvant, d'un centre toujours décentré, d'une périphérie toujours déplacée qui les répète et les différencie.”

“I make, remake and unmake my concepts along a moving horizon, from an always decentered center, from an always displaced periphery which repeats and differentiates them.”

“Il campo è lo spazio che si apre quando lo stato di eccezione comincia a diventare la regola.”

“The camp is the space that is opened when the state of exception begins to become the rule. In the camp, the state of exception, which was essentially a temporary suspension of the rule of law on the basis of a factual state of danger, is now given a permanent spatial arrangement.”

“The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction and the distinction between true and false no longer exist.”

“Die Natur, die die Möglichkeit des Geistes in sich birgt, offenbart eine teleologische Tendenz, der die bloß kausalen Erklärungen der Naturwissenschaft nicht gerecht werden können.”

“Nature, by harboring in itself the possibility of the mind, reveals a teleological tendency with which the merely causal explanations of natural science cannot do justice.”

“Gedanken ohne Inhalt sind leer, Anschauungen ohne Begriffe sind blind.”

“Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind.”

“Love is the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real. Love, and so art and morals, is the discovery of reality.”

“The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing. There exists a great chasm between those, on one side, who relate everything to a single central vision and those who pursue many ends, often unrelated and even contradictory.”

“Il n'y a pas de hors-texte.”

“There is nothing outside the text.”

“Tout existant naît sans raison, se prolonge par faiblesse et meurt par rencontre.”

“Every existing thing is born without reason, prolongs itself out of weakness, and dies by chance.”

“Justice is the first virtue of social institutions, as truth is of systems of thought. A theory however elegant and economical must be rejected or revised if it is untrue; likewise laws and institutions no matter how efficient and well-arranged must be reformed or abolished if they are unjust.”

“There is no gender identity behind the expressions of gender; that identity is performatively constituted by the very "expressions" that are said to be its results.”

“Öffentlichkeit läßt sich am ehesten als ein Netzwerk für die Kommunikation von Inhalten und Stellungnahmen beschreiben.”

“The public sphere is a realm of our social life in which something approaching public opinion can be formed. Access is guaranteed to all citizens.”

“道可道，非常道。名可名，非常名。”

“The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao. The name that can be named is not the eternal name.”

“Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen.”

“Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.”

“You have power over your mind — not outside events. Realize this, and you will find strength.”

“To be a good human being is to have a kind of openness to the world, an ability to trust uncertain things beyond your own control.”

“La visibilité est un piège.”

“Visibility is a trap.”

“It is the responsibility of intellectuals to speak the truth and to expose lies.”

“Ὁ δὲ ἀνεξέταστος βίος οὐ βιωτὸς ἀνθρώπῳ.”

“The unexamined life is not worth living.”

“La naissance du lecteur doit se payer de la mort de l'Auteur.”

“The birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author.”

“Non exiguum temporis habemus, sed multum perdidimus.”

“It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a great deal of it.”

“Je voudrais que chaque vie humaine soit de la pure liberté transparente.”

“I wish that every human life might be pure transparent freedom.”

“L'attention est la forme la plus rare et la plus pure de la générosité.”

“Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.”

“The function of ideology is not to offer us a point of escape from our reality but to offer us the social reality itself as an escape from some traumatic, real kernel.”

“Mennesker forlanger Ytringsfrihed som Erstatning for den Tænkefrihed, som de sjældent bruger.”

“People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use.”

“Die Kulturindustrie geht weniger auf die Reaktionen ihrer Kunden ein, als daß sie diese fälscht. Sie drillt sie, indem sie sich aufführt, als sei sie selbst der Kunde.”

“The culture industry not so much adapts to the reactions of its customers as it counterfeits them. It drills them by behaving as though it were itself the customer.”

“フェミニズムは弱者が強者になろうとする思想ではありません。弱者が弱者のままで尊重されることを求める思想です。”

“Feminism is not a thought that makes weak people strong. It is a thought that makes weak people remain weak and still be accepted as they are.”

“Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit verliert seine Aura.”

“The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction loses its aura.”

“吾生也有涯，而知也无涯。以有涯随无涯，殆已。”

“My life has a limit, but knowledge has none. To pursue what is limitless with what is limited is perilous.”