Existence and Existents Quotes

“We breathe for the sake of breathing, eat and drink for the sake of eating and drinking, we take shelter for the sake of taking shelter, we study to satisfy our curiosity, we take a walk for the walk. All that's not for the sake of living, it is living. Life is a sincerity.”
― Emmanuel Levinas, Existence and Existents

“In weariness, existence is like the reminder of a commitment to exist, with all the seriousness and harshness of an irrevocable contract. One has to do something, one has to aspire after and undertake [...] In weariness we want to escape existence itself, and not only one of its landscapes in a longing for more beautiful skies. An evasion without an itinerary and without an end, it is not trying to come ashore somewhere.”
― Emmanuel Levinas, Existence and Existents

“At the very moment when the world seems to break up we still take it seriously and perform reasonable acts and undertakings, the condemned man still drinks his glass of rum. To call it everyday and condemn it as inauthentic is to fail to recognize the sincerity of hunger and thirst”
― Emmanuel Levinas, Existence and Existents

“Its strangeness is, we might say, due to its very reality, to the very fact that there is existence. The questioning of Being is an experience of Being in its strangeness”
― Emmanuel Levinas, Existence and Existents