youssef elfakir

“What could an entirely rational being speak of with another entirely rational being?”
― Emmanuel Levinas

“The contemporary world, scientific, technical, and sensualist, sees itself without exit - that is, without God - not because everything there is permitted and, by the way of technology, possible, but because everything there is equal. The unknown is immediately made familiar [...] The enchantment of sites, hyperbole of metaphorical concepts, the artifice of art, exaltation of ceremonies, the magic of solemnities - everywhere is suspected and denounced a theatrical apparatus, a purely rhetorical transcendence, the game. Vanity of vanities: the echo of our own voices, taken for a response to the few prayers that still remain to us; everywhere we have fallen back upon our own feet, as after the ecstasies of a drug. Except the other whom, in all this boredom, we cannot let go.”
― Emmanuel Levinas

“…in crucial times, when the perishability of so many values is revealed, all human dignity consists in believing in their return.”
― Emmanuel Levinas, Proper Names

“When around one everything has become silent, solemn as a clear, starlit night, when the soul comes to be alone in the whole world, then before one there appears, not an extraordinary human being, but the eternal power itself, then the heavens open, and the I chooses itself or, more correctly, receives itself. Then the personality receives the accolade of knighthood that ennobles it for an eternity.”
― Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or: A Fragment of Life