Jacques Derrida Quotes

64 quotes in 889 categories

• Beyond the touchline there is nothing.
• There is nothing outside the text
• A determination or an effect within a system which is no longer that of a presence but of a diffrance, a system that no longer…
• Learning to live ought to mean learning to die - to acknowledge, to accept, an absolute mortality - without positive outcome,or resurrection, or redemption, for…
• Survival in the conventional sense of the term means to continue to live, but also to live after death.
• The only attitude (the only politics--judicial, medical, pedagogical and so forth) I would absolutely condemn is one which, directly or indirectly, cuts off the possibility…
• That is what deconstruction is made of: not the mixture but the tension between memory, fidelity, the preservation of something that has been given to…
• The trace I leave to me means at once my death, to come or already come, and the hope that it will survive me. It…
• I became the stage for the great argument between Nietzsche and Rousseau. I was the extra ready to take on all the roles.
• 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…
• 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…
• I never give in to the temptation to be difficult just for the sake of being difficult. That would be too ridiculous.
• Who ever said that one was born just once?
• No one will ever know from what secret I am writing and the fact that I say so changes nothing.
• If things were simple, word would have gotten around.
• It is to have a compulsive, repetitive, and nostalgic desire for the archive, an irrepressible desire to return to the origin, a homesickness, a nostalgia…
• One often speaks without seeing, without knowing, without meaning what one says.
• Actually, when I write, there is a feeling of necessity, of something that is stronger than myself that demands that I must write as I…
• I would like to write you so simply, so simply, so simply. Without having anything ever catch the eye, excepting yours alone, ... so that…
• I was wondering myself where I am going. So I would answer you by saying, first, that I am trying, precisely, to put myself at…

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