Quotes About Life

There is the possible in the organism. The embryo is not simple matter, but matter which refers to the future.

Life is not a sort of quasi-interiority, it is only a fold, the reality of a process, as Whitehead would say, in observable up close.

The unfurling of the animal is like a pure wake that is related to no boat.

Evolution, life, physis, appear here as enveloping with regard to 'consciousness' of human knowledge.

What is given is the metamorphosis of brute being, the giving birth.

We would speak of nothing if it were only necessary to speak of that with which we coincide, since speech is already a separation. Moreover, there is no experience without speech, the purely lived is not even found within man's speaking life. But the primary sense of speech is, nevertheless, in this text of experience that it attempts to utter.

From the moment of conception and still more after birth, there is an encroachment towards a future which is made from itself, under certain given conditions, and which is not the act of a donation of sense. Birth is not an act of constitution but the institution of a future. Reciprocally, institution resides in the same genus of Being as birth and is not, any more than birth, an act.

The study of the appearance of animals takes on interest when we understand this appearance as a language. We must grasp the mystery of life in the way that animals show themselves to each other...There is a specular relation between animals: each is the mirror of the other...What exists are not separated animals, but an inter-animality...The identity of that which sees and that which it sees appears to be an ingredient of animality.

What the animal shows is not the manifestation of a finality, but rather of an existential value of manifestation, of presentation. What the animal shows is not utility; rather, its appearance manifests something that resembles our oneiric life.

Personal existence is intermittent

There is a mythical apace where directions and positions are determined by the placement of great affective entities...In the dream, as in the myth, we learn where the phenomenon is located by sensing what our desire moves toward, what strikes fear in our hearts, and upon what our life depends.

We are the parents of a Nature of which we are also the children

The life of thought transforms its own notions. Would not a thought in equilibrium actually be an absence of thought? Thought should be known in states of equilibrium, but in relative and nonfinal states of equilibrium. We know that our most profound convictions will be completed and modified by our future experiences. All equilibrium of thought contains in itself an evolutionary seef.

The natural 'thing,' the organism, the behavior of others and my own behavior exist only by their meaning; but this meaning which springs forth in them is not yet a Kantian object; the intentional life which constitutes them is not yet a representation; and the 'comprehension' which gives access to them is not yet an intellection.

We must understand life as the opening of a field of action. The animal is produced by the production of a milieu, that is, by the appearing in the physical world of a field radically different from the physical world with its specific temporality and spatiality,

Just as there is an Ineinander of life and physiochemistry, i.e., the realization of life as a fold or a singularity of physiochemistry--or structure, so to is the human to be taken in the Ineinander with animality and Nature.

We must recognize a sort of sedimentation of our life: when an attitude toward the world has been confirmed often enough, it becomes privileged for us...After having built my life upon an inferiority complex, continuously reinforced for twenty years, it is not likely that I would change.

Every act of reflection, every voluntary taking up of a position is established against the background and upon the proposition of a pre-personal life of consciousness.

The trans-phenomenal reality of love would be, not that of a positive being who is without doubt, but that of...a lack...the other person as occupying the entire horizon of my life and not as a positive being. Love is the same thing as privation.

Art stops human beings from working at their lives for a moment, and in that instant the entire truth of life is found.

For the psychoanalyst, what is original is the structure of the body as an emblem of life.

The possession of a representation or the exercise of a judgment is not coextensive with the life of consciousness. Rather, consciousness is a network of signification intentions which are sometimes clear to themselves and sometimes, on the contrary, lived rather than known.

The complete man, the man who does not dream, who can die well because he has lived well, and who can love his life because he envisages his death is, like the myth of the Androgyne, the symbol of what we lack.

What is required by the facts which Freud describes under the name of repression, complex, regression or resistance is only the possibility of a fragmented life of consciousness which does not possess a unique significance at all times.