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Otherness Quotes

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Otherness Quotes

“Beyond thought I reach a state. I refuse to divide it up into words - and what I cannot and do not want to express ends up being the most secret of my secrets. I know that I'm scared of the moments in which I don't use thought and that's a momentary state that is difficult to reach, and which, entirely secret, no longer uses words with which thoughts are produce. Is not using words to lose your identity? is it getting lost in the harmful essential shadows?”

SecretConsciousnessIdentityExpressionThoughtsWordsFleetingBeingShadowsOthernessEssentialBeyondState Of Being
Author:Clarice Lispector
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“You are not white, but a rainbow of colors. You are not black, but golden. You are not just a nationality, but a citizen of the world. You are not just for the right or left, but for what is right over the wrong. You are not just rich or poor, but always wealthy in the mind and heart. You are not perfect, but flawed. You are flawed, but you are just. You may just be conscious human, but you are also a magnificent reflection of God.”

WorldLoveLifeGodWisdomSpiritualPoetryValuesHumanityLeftPeaceBlackWealthJusticeWhitePoorAttitudeKnowledgeRichMankindRevolutionPerspectiveMoralityIntegrityPoemMindfulnessRacismHumanPerfectionGoldHumanismMindsetGoldenNationalismFlawsWealthyWrongMoralsHumankindRightRainbowMagnificentAfricaFlawedNationGlobal CitizenColorsEthnicityViewJustOthernessFairWorld CitizenCitizenLife PoemRacesNeutralPolitical PartyCitizen Of The WorldReflection Of GodMoralesLion Of GodWorld PoetryConscious HumanGoodphilosophy Quotes
Book:Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem
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“The risibility of our altruistic 'understanding' is rivalled only by the profound contempt it is designed to conceal. For 'We respect the fact that you are different' read: 'You people who are underdeveloped would do well to hang on to this distinction because it is all you have left' . (The signs of folklore and poverty are excellent markers of difference.) Nothing could be more contemptuous - or more contemptible - than this attitude, which exemplifies the most radical form of incomprehension that exists. It has nothing to do, however, with what Segalen calls 'eternal incomprehensibility' . Rather, it is a product of eternal stupidity - of that stupidity which endures for ever in its essential arrogance, feeding on the differentness of other people. Other cultures, meanwhile, have never laid claim to universality. Nor did they ever claim to be different - until difference was forcibly injected into them as part of a sort of cultural opium war. They live on the basis of their own singularity, their own exceptionality, on the irreducibility of their own rites and values. They find no comfort in the lethal illusion that all differences can be reconciled - an illusion that for them spells only annihilation. To master the universal symbols of otherness and difference is to master the world. Those who conceptualize difference are anthropologically superior - naturally, because it is they who invented anthropology. And they have all the rights, because rights, too, are their invention. Those who do not conceptualize difference, who do not play the game of difference, must be exterminated. The Indians of America, when the Spanish landed, are a case in point. They understood nothing about difference; they inhabited radical otherness. (The Spaniards were not different in their eyes: they were simply gods, and that was that.) This is the reason for the fury with which the Spaniards set about destroying these peoples, a fury for which there was no religious justification, nor economic justification, nor any other kind of justification, except for the fact that the Indians were guilty of an absolute crime: their failure to understand difference. When they found themselves obliged to become part of an otherness no longer radical, but negotiable under the aegis of the universal concept, they preferred mass self-immolation - whence the fervour with which they, for their part, allowed themselves to die: a counterpart to the Spaniards' mad urge to kill. The Indians' strange collusion in their own extermination represented their only way of keeping the secret of otherness.”

RespectContemptAltruismDifferenceOthernessIncomprehension
Book:The Transparency of Evil: Essays in Extreme Phenomena
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“Когда дети в спокойной обстановке разговаривают о своей жизни, идет важный процесс, в ходе которого они пытаются хоть на некоторое время увидеть мир глазами другого человека. При этом мы можем донести до детей также и мысль о том, что в жизни есть множество различных способов выражения любви. Некоторые люди всю свою жизнь проводят в поисках только одного, определенного проявления любви и нигде не находят его, в то время как окружающие проявляют свою любовь к ним всеми возможными способами, кроме искомого. Поскольку все люди жаждут любви, умение видеть ее различные проявления — важная составляющая искусства быть счастливыми.”

LoveDiversityEmpathyToleranceOtherness
Book:Как научить детей сотрудничать? Психологические игры и упражнения: Практическое пособие. Часть 1
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“Egykori kedvteléseim során olyan tapasztalatokra tettem szert, amelyek kárpótolnak valamelyest az elveszített gyönyörökért. Valaha azt hittem, s jó pillanataimban néha még ma is azt hiszem, hogy e tapasztalatok révén valamennyi ember létezésében osztozhatom, s hogy ez az együttérzés egyik legbiztosabb módja a halhatatlanságnak. Voltak percek életemben, amikor arra törekedtem, hogy az emberinél többet értsek meg, hogy az úszó embertől magáig a hullámig jussak el....”

Life LessonsEmpathyExperienceOpen MindednessOtherness
Author:Yourcenar Marguerite
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“Doesn't everyone have in them this potential change and becoming? This absolute singularity which demands only to occur effortlessly, an inspired form freed from the straitjacket of our individual being? We have this becoming within us, and we lack nothing, since we are rid of truth. The world too lacks nothing as it is; it opposes any attempt to make it signify anything whatever. To inflict truth on it is like explaining a joke or a funny story.”

TruthBecomingJokeOthernessInfinite Jest
Book:The Intelligence of Evil or the Lucidity Pact
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“They want us to be afraid. They want us to be afraid of leaving our homes. They want us to barricade our doors and hide our children. Their aim is to make us fear life itself! They want us to hate. They want us to hate 'the other'. They want us to practice aggression and perfect antagonism. Their aim is to divide us all! They want us to be inhuman. They want us to throw out our kindness. They want us to bury our love and burn our hope. Their aim is to take all our light! They think their bricked walls will separate us. They think their damned bombs will defeat us. They are so ignorant they don’t understand that my soul and your soul are old friends. They are so ignorant they don’t understand that when they cut you I bleed. They are so ignorant they don’t understand that we will never be afraid, we will never hate and we will never be silent for life is ours!”

LoveLifeInspirationalKindChildrenWarSoulHomeLightInspirationGovernmentHateHumanityHopePoliticsFearPeaceChangeCommunityDarkSilenceKindnessDarknessMediaIgnoranceRevolutionArmsFriendsTrumpBattleConflictHumanHatredMurderAimUnitySilentDefeatHungerScaredCorruptionScaryActivismSeparationIgnorantOnenessBombsHopefulProtestHopelessDivisionActivistGenocideRebelFightScarExecutionAggressionSolidarityWholenessHopelessnessPoliticiansOne LoveHostilityHumaneRebelliousUnderstandKamandKojouriKillKamand KojouriRevoltFamineCorruptAfraidAnnihilationInhumanAdvocacyDonald TrumpUnionDoorHideAnimosityWar QuotesBurnCamaraderieUnity QuotesAntagonismWallsHumannessOthernessMassacreHousesInhumaneBombSeparateLove WinsCutBleedExtortionObjectDivideBuryFutileExecuteLife PoemsLove RevolutionOutcryDisapproveObliterateHope PoemsObjectionSolidarity QuotesWar PoemsAnnihilateBarricadeOne NationUnity PoemsOne EarthSolidarity PoemsLove Trumps WarNo Wall
Author:Kamand Kojouri
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“This being is the other after the death of the Other - not the same other at all: the other that results from the denial of the Other. The only interaction involved, in reality, belongs to the medium alone: to the machine become invisible. Mechanical automata still played on the difference between man and machine, and on the charm of this difference - something with which today's interactive and simulating automata are no longer concerned. Man and machine have become isomorphic and indifferent to each other: neither is other to the other. The computer has no other. That is why the computer is not intelligent. Intelligence comes to us from the other - always. That is why computers perform so well. Champions of mental arithmetic and idiots savants are autistic - minds for which the other does not exist and which, for that very reason, are endowed with strange powers. This is the strength, too, of the integrated circuit (the power of thought-transference might also be considered in this connection). Such is the power of abstraction. Machines work more quickly because they are unlinked to any otherness. Networks connect them up to one another like an immense umbilical cord joining one intelligence and its twin. Homeostasis between one and the same: all otherness has been confiscated by the machine. Does otherness survive anywhere after being banished from this entire psychodramatic superstructure? Is there a physics as well as a metaphysics of the Other? Is there a dual, not just a dialectical, form of otherness? Is there still a form of the Other as destiny, and not merely as a psychological or social partner of convenience?”

DestinyIntelligenceAbsenceOthernessMan And Machine
Book:The Transparency of Evil: Essays in Extreme Phenomena
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“And suddenly, lying in bed, I became aware of every inch of my body and I apologised to it, quietly. I apologised for bring so ungrateful for so long. Then I thanked my arms, hands and fingers for always trying so hard. I thanked my legs and feet for holding me up all the time. I thanked my brain for working so amazingly well and conjuring up thoughts and dreams and sentences and images and crazy poems. And I thanked all my organs for working together and giving me life. It had taken four and a half billion years for me to be here. Right now. In this universe. And in that moment, I felt totally overwhelmed at being alive. There could be nothing but there was everything. I didn't want to waste a single second more worrying about trivialities. Worrying that I'd never match up to an ideal that didn't even exist. Nobody is normal. We are all different. I had to make sure that every moment I had left on this planet counted.”

ComedyAcceptanceConfidenceDisabilityBody ImageDisabledNormalityOthernessAbnormality
Author:Francesca Martínez
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“Where had they learned to converse and to dance? I couldn't converse or dance. Everybody knew something I didn't know. The girls looked so good, the boys so handsome. I would be too terrified to even look at one of those girls, let alone be close to one. To look into her eyes or dance with her would be beyond me. And yet I know that what I saw wasn't as simple and good as it appeared. There was a price to be paid for it all, a general falsity, that could be easily believed, and could be the first step down a dead-end street.”

InstinctIsolationDifferenceAlonenessOtherness
Book:Ham On Rye
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“According to Melanie Klein, we develop moral responses in reaction to questions of survivability. My wager is that Klein is right about that, even as she thwarts her own insight by insisting that it is the ego's survivability that is finally at issue. Why the ego? After all, if my survivability depends on a relation to others, to a "you" or a set of "yous" without whom I cannot exist, then my existence is not mine alone, but is to be found outside myself, in this set of relations that precede and exceed the boundaries of who I am. If I have a boundary at all, or if a boundary can be said to belong to me, it is only because I have become separated from others, and it is only on condition of this separation that I can relate to them at all. So the boundary is a function of the relation, a brokering of difference, a negotiation in which I am bound to you in my separateness. If I seek to preserve your life, it is not only because I seek to preserve my own, but because who "I" am is nothing without your life, and life itself has to be rethought as this complex, passionate, antagonistic, and necessary set of relations to others. I may lose this "you" and any number of particular others, and I may well survive those losses. But that can happen only if I do not lose the possibility of any "you" at all. If I survive, it is only because my life is nothing without the life that exceeds me, that refers to some indexical you, without whom I cannot be.”

LifeLossGriefMoralitySurvivalBoundariesDissociationSelf PreservationSeperationOthernessButlerBeing WithKlein
Book:Frames of War: When is Life Grievable?
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“What we ourselves have fallen victim to -- and by no means allegorically -- is a virus destructive of otherness. And we may predict that -- even more than in the case of AIDS -- no science will be able to protect us from this viral pathology which, by dint of antibodies and immune strategies, aims at the extinction, pure and simple, of the other. Though, for the moment, this virus does not affect the biological reproduction of the species, it affects an even more fundamental function, that of the symbolic reproduction of the other, favouring, rather, a cloned, asexual reproduction of the species-less individual. For to be deprived of the other is to be deprived of sex, and to be deprived of sex is to be deprived of symbolic belonging to any species whatsoever.”

SexOtherness
Book:The Perfect Crime
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“Whenever I'm in the company of strangers and speak in a way that reveals my Slav accent, the question follows: "Where are you from?" I always reply politely. It's very important to me that I say exactly where I'm from, and explain where that place is in case the person I'm talking to has never hears of my country ("in Europe, near Italy"). I suppose that's the need in me to feel accepted for what I am.”

Foreign LanguageOthernessThe OtherAccentForeignerSlavic Peoples
Book:My Heart
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“When we are looking for the unexpected, we are not only looking for the unexpected in ourselves, but we are also curious about the unexpected in the behavior of the others. So as to know the others, we have got to learn how and where they differ from us. By understanding this, we are able to establish an uplifting link with otherness. ( "Looking for the unexpected" )”

UnderstandingBehaviorCuriousUpliftingUnexpectedLearnKnowOthersOthernessHowWhereEstablishDifferLinkLooking For
Author:Erik Pevernagie
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“How fair is it to judge a person based on his sexual preferences, or their ‘otherness’? As long as a person is not ‘harmful’ for others or not violating the rights of others, I think we need not be bothered about their personal lives, whom they love or whom they marry. It is a personal choice. I think the most important thing about a person is his or her ‘humanity’, kindness, selflessness not their ‘sex life’ (only as long as he or she is not violating the rights of others or causing harm to others). It is entirely a disgrace on humanity to ‘discriminate’ a person solely based on their ‘otherness’. I am surprised to see how the society stands against or make fun out of ‘gay’ people, who are totally harmless, ignoring the ‘human’ in them, but feel ‘OK’ with ‘rapists’, ‘sex maniacs’, ‘prostitution’ and ‘sexual violence against women and children’ occurring in Sri Lanka every day.”

LoveHumanityGaySexualityHumanity And SocietyGay RightsOthernessAma H Vanniarachchy
Author:Ama H.Vanniarachchy
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“Consequently the other is all of a sudden no longer there to be exterminated, hated, rejected or seduced, but instead to be understood, liberated, coddled, recognized. In addition to the Rights of Man, we now also need the Rights of the Other. In a way we already have these, in the shape of a universal Right to be Different. For the orgy is also an orgy of political and psychological comprehension of the other - even to the point of resurrecting the other in places where the other is no longer to be found. Where the Other was, there has the Same come to be. And where there is no longer anything, there the Other must come to be. We are no longer living the drama of otherness. We are living the psychodrama of otherness, just as we are living the psychodrama of 'sociality', the psychodrama of sexuality, the psychodrama of the body - and the melodrama of all the above, courtesy of analytic metadiscourses. Otherness has become sociodramatic, semiodramatic, melodramatic.”

ToleranceLiberalismOthernessOtherAbra Los OjosPsychodrama
Book:The Transparency of Evil: Essays in Extreme Phenomena
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“The story of one life cannot be told separately from the story of other lives. Who are we? The question is not simple. What we call the self is part of a larger matrix of relationship and society. Had we been born to a different family, in a different time, to a different world, we would not be the same. All the lives that surround us are in us.”

WarRelationshipsHistorySelf HelpTraumaConnectednessOthernessOthering
Book:A Chorus of Stones: The Private Life of War
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“Just outside the walls of the City, trouble was brewing. They came in boats from a land far across the sea. Many boats crammed with many hopefuls washed up on the shores in the shadow of the great cliffs. Like driftwood. These flotsam people were dazed, broken – perhaps at an extreme – optimistic. Surely there would be salvation within the thick city walls? They appeared in a whisper – like the hissing of the surf. No citizen came to welcome them. No delegates. No photo-ops for ambitious politicians. Instead, only the City’s military – soldiers and officers with faces as hard and blank as the cliff the City teetered upon – were waiting. They were herded in silence. Those without papers were left on the stony beach. There would be tents, bunks, and prefab houses in time. The lucky ones were escorted up the great lifts and transported along the subway system – out of sight. A Downtown station would process them. See this crowd of Driftwood people, Eva. See them huddle together in the dark, the glint of hope in their eyes. The color of their skin, how the women covered their hair, and how the men wore their beards – these were the superficial differences that would mark them so starkly here. The label of ‘other’ already hung around their necks without them even knowing.”

RefugeesOthernessOthering
Book:The Silent Symphony
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“Language, the unconscious, the parents, the symbolic order: these terms in Lacan are not exactly synonymous, but they are intimately allied. They are sometimes spoken of by him as the ‘Other’ — as that which like language is always anterior to us and will always escape us, that which brought us into being as subjects in the first place but which always outruns our grasp. We have seen that for Lacan our unconscious desire is directed towards this Other, in the shape of some ultimately gratifying reality which we can never have; but it is also true for Lacan that our desire is in some way always received from the Other too. We desire what others — our parents, for instance — unconsciously desire for us; and desire can only happen because we are caught up in linguistic, sexual and social relations — the whole field of the ‘Other’ — which generate it.”

DesireLanguageUnconsciousOthernessLacanThe OtherPsychonanlysisThe Symbolic
Book:Literary Theory: An Introduction
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“If you’re an Orthodox believer, then what sustains this framework is the obligation that you follow. But if you live in a democratic, liberal world whose motto is: “Make choices and manage your choices according to what is good for you,” then there is a built-in tension between that which connects and that which divides. Between the material and the intellectual or ethical. Materialism is not a dirty word, but in this tension between the individual and the material on the one hand, and the communal and the ethical on the other, we are at the end of an age in which the material and the individual are triumphing.”

CommunityMaterialismJudaismOthernessProgressivesEthics And Moral Philosophy
Author:Kalid Gilad
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“While we are curling down in our comfort zone, the perverted talents of connectivity-designers drive us surreptitiously into a blind alley of addiction. If, however, we succeed in impeding mobiles' unlimited rule, we may be able to relish the fragrance of the ‘moment’ but also sense the vital spark and spirit of “otherness”. ("Even if the world goes down, my mobile will save me")”

WorldSpiritSucceedAddictionComfort ZoneUnlimitedFragranceDriveSenseSaveOthernessSparkVitalConnectivityDesignersHoweverThe MomentPervertedImpedeSurreptitiousMobilesGo DownAlentsBlind AlleyCurl DownRulerelish
Author:Erik Pevernagie
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“Christianity grasped perfectly that there is an element in the apparent contingency of love that can’t be reduced to that contingency. But it immediately raised it to the level of transcendence, and that is the root of the problem. This universal element I too recognize in love as immanent. But Christianity has somehow managed to elevate it and refocus it onto a transcendent power. It’s an ideal that was already partly present in Plato, through the idea of the Good. It is a brilliant first manipulation of the power of love and one we must now bring back to earth. I mean we must demonstrate that love really does have universal power, but that it is simply the opportunity we are given to enjoy a positive, creative, affirmative experience of difference. The Other, no doubt, but without the “Almighty-Other”, without the “Great Other” of transcendence.”

LoveGodReligionChristianityIdentityTranscendenceDifferenceOthernessThe Other
Book:In Praise Of Love
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“It was, of course, precisely this flippant attitude, one Lawrence seemed determined to flaunt both in his correspondence and in person, that so incensed his military superiors. But his defiance of soldierly protocol also underscored a deeper truth: Lawrence was fundamentally not of them, and was becoming less so all the time.”

DefianceLonerOthernessMaverickWorld War OneTe Lawrence
Book:Lawrence in Arabia: War, Deceit, Imperial Folly, and the Making of the Modern Middle East
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“The notion that talking-animal narratives are not really about animals—that the worthwhile ones, at least, must surely be about something more than mere animals—is quite consistent with the far wider cultural trivialization and marginalization of the animal. The animal content of literary, artistic and other cultural productions is seldom regarded as a serious or proper field of inquiry.”

LiteratureAnimalsRepresentationSymbolismOthernessNarratologyHuman Animal Studies
Book:The Mythology of the Animal Farm in Children's Literature: Over the Fence
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“All we do in psychodrama - the psychodrama of contacts, of psychological tests, of interfacing - is acrobatically simulate and dramatize the absence of the other. Not only is otherness absent everywhere in this artificial dramaturgy, but the subject has also quietly become indifferent to his own subjectivity, to his own alienation, just as the modern political animal has become indifferent to his own political opinions. This subject becomes transparent, spectral (to borrow Marc Guillaume's word) - and hence interactive. For in interactivity the subject is the other to no one. Inasmuch as he is indifferent to himself, it is as though he had been reified alive - but without his double, without his shadow, without his other. Having paid this price, the subject becomes a candidate for all possible combinations, all possible connections. The interactive being is therefore born not through a new form of exchange but through the disappearance of the social, the disappearance of otherness.”

SubjectivityOthernessInteractivity
Book:The Transparency of Evil: Essays in Extreme Phenomena
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“Life can be generous, but leaves us with a trilemma: How can we reconcile three diverse features: ‘I’, 'me' and the 'others'. Since the “I” entails what I want; the “me” what others expect of me and the “others” what others themselves want. The bridges between "individuality", “surroundings” and "otherness" can be abysmal and very often waiting to be restored. (“I am on my own side, but I can listen “ )”

WantLifeIndividualityFeaturesGenerousDiverseSurroundingsListenReconcileOthersMeIExpectBridgeOthernessSideRestoredAbysmalEntailTrilemma
Author:Erik Pevernagie
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“Somos libres porque nos movemos. Salimos de una herida llamada soledad y viajamos a otra herida llamada muerte. Hay un cruce de caminos entre el punto de partida y el punto de llegada. En ese corretear, mi niña adorada encontramos siempre al otro, al que no es como nosotros, y nos vemos obligados a entender que si nos movemos y nos encontramos, debemos amarnos a partir del contraste.”

OthernessAlteridad
Book:Todas las familias felices
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“We learn from traveling that it makes a huge difference to simply acknowledge and greet each other; to ask whenever possible or appropriate, whether someone is alright; and most importantly to foil the plans and intentions of fear and warmongers using every medium and platform to get us to distrust, hate, and be afraid of each other, or to beware of strangers." [From “Can We Travel Without Being Tourists?” published on CounterPunch on March 15, 2024]”

HateCultureRacismTouristsTravelingStrangersOthernessTravelersForeignnessFearmongering
Author:Louis Yako
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