Top 80 Jacques Derrida Quotes (2025 Update)
Page 2 of 2

51. “Every text participates in one or several genres, there is no genreless text; there is always a genre and genres, yet such participation never amounts to belonging.”

— Jacques Derrida

52. “The wound can have just one proper name. I recognize that I love you by this: you leave in me a wound I do not want to replace.”

— Jacques Derrida

53. “Er is niets buiten de tekst.”

— Jacques Derrida

54. “A text is not a text unless it hides from the first comer, from the first glance, the law of its composition and the rules of its game. A text remains, moreover, forever imperceptible. Its laws and rules are not, however, harbored in the inaccessibility of a secret; it is simply that they can never be booked, in the present, into anything that could rigorously be called a perception.”

— Jacques Derrida

55. “Religion is responsibility or it is nothing at all. Its history derives its sense entirely from the idea of a passage to responsibility.”

— Jacques Derrida

56. “Everyone must assume their own death, that is to say, the one thing in the world that no one else can either give or take: therein resides freedom and responsibility.”

— Jacques Derrida

57. “I do everything I think possible or acceptable to escape from this trap.”

— Jacques Derrida

58. “No one will ever know from what secret I am writing and the fact that I say so changes nothing.”

— Jacques Derrida

59. “In Algeria, I had begun to get into literature and philosophy. I dreamed of writing-and already models were instructing the dream, a certain language governed it.”

— Jacques Derrida

60. “An act of naming should quite rightly enable me to call any-thing a self-portrait, not only any drawing, ‘portrait’ or not, but everything that happens to me, that I can affect, or that affects me.”

— Jacques Derrida

61. “I believe in the value of the book, which keeps something irreplaceable, and in the necessity of fighting to secure its respect.”

— Jacques Derrida

62. “There is no simple answer to such a question.”

— Jacques Derrida

63. “Still today, I cannot cross the threshold of a teaching institution without physical symptoms, in my chest and my stomach, of discomfort or anxiety. And yet I have never left school.”

— Jacques Derrida

64. “Whatever precautions you take so the photograph will look like this or that, there comes a moment when the photograph surprises you. It is the other’s gaze that wins out and decides.”

— Jacques Derrida

65. “These critics organize and practice in my case a sort of obsessive personality cult which philosophers should know how to question and above all, to moderate.”

— Jacques Derrida

66. “What is certain is that I am not a Marxist, as someone said a long time ago, let us recall, in a witticism reported by Engels. Must we still cite Marx as an authority in order to say “I am not a Marxist”?”

— Jacques Derrida

67. “I know a sentence that is still more terrifying, more terribly ambiguous than “I am alone,” and it is, isolated from any other determining context, the sentence that would say to the other: “I am alone with you.” Meditate on the abyss of such a sentence: I am alone with you, with you I am alone, alone in all the world.”

— Jacques Derrida

68. “Peace is only possible when one of the warring sides takes the first step, the hazardous initiative, the risk of opening up dialogue, and decides to make the gesture that will lead not only to an armistice but to peace.”

— Jacques Derrida

69. “We are given over to absolute solitude. No one can speak with us and no one can speak for us; we must take it upon ourselves, each of us must take it upon himself.”

— Jacques Derrida

70. “I became the stage for the great argument between Nietzsche and Rousseau. I was the extra ready to take on all the roles.”

— Jacques Derrida

71. “Survival in the conventional sense of the term means to continue to live, but also to live after death.”

— Jacques Derrida

72. “I am one of those marranes who no longer say they are Jews even in the secret of their own hearts.”

— Jacques Derrida

73. “Capitalist societies can always heave a sigh of relief and say to themselves: communism is finished since the collapse of the totalitarianisms of the twentieth century and not only is it finished, but it did not take place, it was only a ghost They do no more than disavow the undeniable itself. a ghost never dies, it remains always to come and to come-back.”

— Jacques Derrida

74. “My most resolute opponents believe that I am too visible, that I am a little too alive, that my name echoes too much in the texts which they nevertheless claim to be inaccessible.”

— Jacques Derrida

75. “I have always had school sickness, as others have seasickness. I cried when it was time to go back to school long after I was old enough to be ashamed of such behavior.”

— Jacques Derrida

76. “The boarding-school experience in Paris was very hard, I didn’t put up with it very well. I was sick all the time, or in any case frail, on the edge of a nervous breakdown.”

— Jacques Derrida

77. “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 of a kind of young hooligan.”

— Jacques Derrida

78. “These years of the Ecole Normale were an ordeal. Nothing was handed to me on the first try.”

— Jacques Derrida

79. “Be alert to these invisible quotation marks, even within a word.”

— Jacques Derrida

80. “Why is it the philosopher who is expected to be easier and not some scientist who is even more inaccessible?”

— Jacques Derrida

81. “Every revolution, whether atheistic or religious, bears witness to a return of the sacred – in the form of enthusiasm or fervour, otherwise known as the presence of the gods within us.”

— Jacques Derrida

82. “Our faith is not assured, because faith can never be, it must never be a certainty.”

— Jacques Derrida

83. “The blindness that opens the eye is not the one that darkens vision.”

— Jacques Derrida

84. “Speech frightens me because, by never saying enough, I also say too much.”

— Jacques Derrida

85. “In the proper sense of the word, religion exists once the secret of the sacred, orgiastic, or demonic mystery has been, if not destroyed, at least integrated, and finally subjected to the sphere of responsibility.”

— Jacques Derrida

86. “Western philosophy exhibits schemas such as the substance-attributes relation, where substance is the present being which the attributes modify;.”

— Jacques Derrida