Quotes from Alphonso Lingis

Those who find ecstasy do so not by visiting the shrines of civilization but by trudging in the swamps of human destitution and misery. Our literature of ecstasy recounts the dark nights of the soul and encounters with mystics in the slums and in the refugee camps of genocidal wars.

You will be identified as thin-skinned and moody; in reaction you will identify yourself as civilized and sensitive. You will barricade yourself in that preposterous condition known as self-respect.

Power among humans is not simply the physical force with which one material body may move another; it is the force to distract, detour, maneuver, and command. Every pleasure we indulge in and every pain we suffer exerts power over others.

The violation of the existence and natures of things, of oneself, or of others is evil. Disrespect encroaches upon the space of others, and alters or empties their nature. Respect is respect for the limits, the boundaries, the space of others, and thus for their natures. Morally good action designates the active respect for others, for things, and also for ourselves.

When we attend to someone who greets us, it is not to require confirmation, attestation, certification of our identity. To respond to someone who greets us is to drop our concerns and thoughts, and expose ourselves to her. It is to expose ourselves to questioning and judgment. Simply responding to her greeting is to recognize her rights over us. Each time we enter into conversation we expose ourselves to being altered or emptied out, emptied of our convictions, our expectations, our memories.

A man who works hard and uses his wealth to purchase jewelry to adorn himself, suits tailored in London, shoes handmade in Rome, and a hundred-thousand-dollar sportscar, which he drives cautiously and keeps in meticulous repair, will be viewed by everybody as a poor fool with a lot of pathetic needs.

A question is not a supplication, an entreaty, nor a velleity for knowledge just put out in the air; it is already an order, a command. (Beggars, the destitute, pupils, factory workers, enlisted soldiers, prisoners, and patients have no right to question; they can only entreat.?) A question commands a certain focus of attention, a selection of resources on hand, a certain type of language. It lays down a direction; it imposes a directive to think further down a certain track.

A man who works hard and uses his wealth to purchase jewelry to adorn himself, suits tailored in London, shoes handmade in Rome, and a hundred-thousand-dollar sportscar, which he drives cautiously and keeps in meticulous repair, will be view

In the city people are moving down sidewalks, up and down escalators, along aisles; they are stationed in the driver's seat of buses, at gas pumps, computers, and cash registers. There is a low-intensity fear in them. They avoid turning in certain directions, flailing their arms or poking their hands in certain ways. They respect invisible barriers.

The term gift designates events, apparitions, and things whose grandeur and graciousness remove them from practices of appropriation—from measurement, categorization, and seizure.

The death of a collaborator gives us an unnerving premonition that a like violence—a heavy or sharp tool that slips, an automobile collision, a microbe—could abruptly befall us in our time and space of work and reason, and could annihilate, along with our future, the significance of our past.

There are transcendent collective events. There is anger spreading through the streets of Port-au-Prince in Haiti, anger marking in black the unallowable, the intolerable, anger that hurls itself beyond all that can reasonably be expected or demanded. This anger is the most precious gift of the disinherited to tourists and academics who have imprisoned their hearts through so many years of well-paid compromises and betrayals

Yet we are also drawn to people who are not exemplary, who do not illustrate good sense and responsibility, who are temperamental as stallions, mercurial as falcons, sensual as cheetahs. Before them we relax our compulsion to judge, no longer feel that they have a responsibility to answer to and for what they do and say. We are enthralled by the human animal, the animality in humans, the traits humans acquire in symbiosis with noble animals.

Resentment secretes images that obscure your view of the present and distort your memory of the past. Resentment is a positive force of mendacity.

We would not know what happens if we did not know extreme pleasure, if we did not know extreme pain! It is because we sense that the only way to know what we are capable of, what we care about, what we fear, is to plunge into insecurity, loneliness, hunger, and cold, that we leave home to hitchhike across the country.