Quotes About Experience

Language is the system of differentiations through which the individual articulates his relation to the world.

Memory deforms reality, which nevertheless is formed as reality only in memory

To speak or to write is truly to translate an experience which, without the word that it inspires, would not become a text.

The search for the conditions of possibility is in principle posterior to an actual experience, and from this it follows that even if subsequently one determines rigorously the sine qua non of that experience, it can never be washed of the original stain of having been discovered post festum nor ever become what positively founds that experience.

What makes the weight, the density, the flesh of each color, each sound, each tactile texture, of the present and the world is that he who grasps them feels himself emerge from them by a sort of coiling up or redoubling, fundamentally homogenous with them, that he is the sensible coming to itself and that in return the sensible is to his eyes lime the double or an expression of his flesh.

Each field is a dimension, and Being is dimensionality itself.

Experience anticipates a philosophy and philosophy is but an elucidated experience.

As a system of motor powers or perceptual powers, our body is not an object for an 'I think': it is a totality of lived significations that moved toward it's equilibrium.

I do not think the world in the act of perception: it organizes itself in front of me.

Consciousness is not a good judge of what we are doing since we are involved in the struggle of history and in this we achieve more, less, or something else than we thought we were doing.

The eye accomplishes the prodigious work of opening the soul to what is not soul – the joyous realm of things and their god, the sun.

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

Traumatic experience does not survive as a representation in the mode of objective consciousness and as a 'dated' moment; it is of its essence to survive only as a manner of being and with a certain degree of generality.

History has no single signification; what we do always has several senses, and this is how an existential conception of history is distinguished from both materialism and spiritualism.

Prior to stimuli and sensory contents, we must recognize a kind of inner diaphragm which determines, infinitely more than they do, what our reflexes and perceptions will be able to aim at in the world, the area of our possible operations, the scope of our life.

We would not know even what the false is, if there were not times when we had distinguished it from the true...If we are to be able to speak of falsity, we do have to have experiences of truth.

We inherit powers which are not immediately ours. I record the results of an activity of which I am not a part.

The manner in which the child assumes his relations with the family constellation can be read in the type of perception and knowledge that he accomplishes.

In the last analysis each one of us knows for his own part that the world as it is, is unacceptable.

If it is true that I am conscious of my body through the world and if my body is the unperceived term at the center of the world toward which every object turns its face, then it is true for the same reason that my body is the pivot of of the world.

What we understand by the concept of institution are those events in experience which endow it with durable dimensions, in relation to which a whole series of other experiences will acquire meaning, will form an intelligible series or a history--or again those events which sediment in me a meaning, not just as survivals or residues, but as the invitation to a sequel, the necessity of a future.

The unconscious is not a second consciousness, but a nonthematized lived experience.

The photograph keeps open the instants which the onrush of time closes up forthwith; it destroys the overtaking, the overlapping, the metamorphosis of time.

Originary perception is a non-thetic, pre-objective, and preconscious experience.