Jacques Derrida Quotes

Everyone asks me about being so worried or thinking about existence as if I'm the only person who can't understand why a tree grows the way it does or why a person is in power when they're not that great. These are questions everyone has.

Because we are all poets or babies in the middle of the night, struggling with being.

There are things I am more interested in than the clone thing. How are they trying to find their place in the world and make sense of their lives? To what extent can they transcend their fate? As time starts to run out, what are the things that really matter?

We do not know what we want and yet we are responsible for what we are - that is the fact.

I read Nietzsche when I was a teenager and then I went back to reading him when I was in my thirties, and his voice spoke directly to me. Nietzsche is such a superb literary artist.

Basically, we are a whole world of people desperately trying to figure out what is the dark side of our natures and how much can we explore without becoming something else.

Ethical and questions of philosophy interest me a great deal.

Naturalism teaches one of the most important things in this world. There is only this life, so live wonderfully and meaningfully.

Man is the only creature that refuses to be what he is.

Every human life involves an unfathomable mystery, for man is the riddle of the universe, and the riddle of man in his endowment with personal capacities.

Who can map out the various forces at play in one soul? Man is a great depth, O Lord. The hairs of his head are easier by far to count than his feeling, the movements of his heart.

The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche once wrote that when you look into the darkness of the abyss the abyss looks into you. Probably no other line or thought more inspires or informs my work.

My favorite Swamp Thing stories have always been about a man wrestling with monsters both internal and external.

Probably the only way Woody Allen and I are similar is that he has a lot to say about Nietzsche.

The woman who made those movies, that's not me. She's someone else.

I want to study philosophy. That fascinates me.

I didn't study English literature - I studied philosophy at university - so Kierkegaard, Nietzsche - these people are among the most important writers to me. So my interest is in the big questions more than it is in storytelling.

Starting with the lyrics, 'Only scared of myself and the truth in the stars/I'm a king, I'm the dirt, God within me shine,' the first half of '6 Weeks' delves into my attempts to balance the notion that I have an existential purpose with the realization that I am nothing against the vastness of the universe.

Man has always been his own most vexing problem.

The human mind has to ask "Who, what, whence, whither, why am I?" And it is very doubtful if the human mind can answer any of these questions.

We have long struggles with ourself, of which the outcome is one of our actions; they are, as it were, the inner side of human nature. This inner side is God's; the outer side belongs to men.

Man has always been half-monster, half-dreamer.

I am a person always full of contradictions... It was hard to choose whether to devote myself to revolution as a soldier or as a writer.

There is no need to sally forth, for it remains true that those things which make us human are, curiously enough, always close at hand. Resolve, then, that on this very ground, with small flags waving and tiny blasts on tiny trumpets, we shall meet the enemy, and not only may he be ours, he may be us.

Behind my work was ambition, behind my love was personality, behind my purity was fear, behind my guidance the thirst for power. Now they are vanishing and I drift. I come, Mother, I come, in Thy warm bosom, floating wheresoever Thou takest me, in the voiceless, in the strange, in the wonderland, I come - a spectator, no more an actor.