It is the mission of the twentieth century to elucidate the irrational.

The perceived world is the always-presupposed foundation of all rationality, all value, and all existence.

Because we are in the world, we are condemned to meaning, and we cannot do or say anything without its acquiring a name in history.

To ask for an explanation is to explain the obscure by the more obscure.

Speech is not a means in the service of an external end. It contains its own rule of usage, ethics, and view of the world, as a gesture sometimes bears the whole truth about a man.

Our view of man will remain superficial so long as we fail to go back to that origin [of silence], so long as we fail to find, beneath the chatter of words, the primordial silence, and as long as we do not describe the action which breaks this silence. the spoken word is a gesture, and its meaning, a world.

I may speak many languages, but there remains one in which I live.