“To understand oneself, one needs enormous pliability, and that pliability is denied when we specialize in devotion, in action, in knowledge.”

“A man who denies his past is a man who truly denies himself a future, for he refuses to know himself, and to deny knowledge of oneself is to stumble through life as handicapped as the blind mute.”

“The frontiers of knowledge in the various fields of our subject are expanding at such a rate that, work as hard as one can, one finds oneself further and further away from an understanding of the whole.”

“In the general tendency toward specialization, philosophy too has established itself as a specialized discipline, one purified of all specific content. In so doing, philosophy has denied its own constitutive concept: the intellectual freedom that does not obey the dictates of specialized knowledge.”

“The aptitudes needed to conduct a real research project are fundamentally different from the ones needed for purposes of scientific vulgarisation (like education). This is because above and beyond a capacity for understanding problems and thinking and expressing oneself clearly – something that every good teacher has –an enormous amount of perseverance and stamina is necessary, and above all a scientific approach rooted in real inventiveness.”

“As a suggested working definition, we may define power as control or influence over the actions of others to promote one's goals without their consent, against their "will," or without their knowledge or understanding.”

“The need to devour oneself absolves one of the need to believe.”

“Instead of determining the action of life, ends, norms and values are determined by it. This determination consists in the fact that one experiences oneself constantly and knows oneself at every moment. Life also knows at each instant what must be done and what is suited to it. This knowledge is no different from action. It does not precede it or "determine" it, properly speaking. It is identical to it, as the original know-how of life, as praxis and a living body. Action, as we have seen, is only the actualization of the primitive power of this phenomenological body.”

“Self-consciousness is not knowledge but a story one tells about oneself.”

“One of the great movements in my lifetime among educated people is the need to commit themselves to action. Most people are not satisfied with giving money; we also feel we need to work. That is why there is an enormous surge in the number of unpaid staff, volunteers. The needs are not going to go away. Business is not going to take up the slack, and government cannot.”