Quotes About Experience

Reflection only fully grasps itself if it refers to the pre-reflective fund it presupposes, upon which it draws, and that constitutes for it, like an original past, a past that has never been present.

Every sensation is already pregnant with a sense.

Memory is the irruption of other things in us.

Concepts for a philosopher are only nets for catching sense.

Every memory reopens lost time and invites us to again take up the situation that it evokes.

Sedimentation is: trace of the forgotten and thereby a call to thought which depends upon itself and goes farther...It is the experience of a resumption which is not totalization, and which precisely for that reason is able to open another development of knowledge.

Consciousness of something is always consciousness of a difference between terms that are not given positively.

Bodily functions take place in a psychic dimension. The digestive tube not only serves for digestion, but is also a manner of entering into relationship with the world.

In psychology, we cannot dispense with the need for an appeal to lived experience, and it is clear that Piaget's schema does not respond to the experience of the subject.

The derangement of the senses is to break through the partitions between them in order to regain their indivision--And through this, a thought not mine but theirs...Things speak through me.

I never rejoin the other's lived experience. It is in the world that we rejoin one another.

Before being reason, humanity is another corporeity.

By institution we were intending here those events in an experience which endow the experience with durable dimensions, in relation to which a whole series of other experiences will make sense, will form a thinkable sequence or history--or again the events which deposit a sense in me, not just as something surviving or as a residue, but as the call to follow, the demand of a future.

There is a world of silence, the perceived world, at least, is an order where there are non-language significations--yes, non-language significations, but they are not accordingly positive. There is for example no absolute flux of singular Erlebnisse; there are fields and a field of fields, with a style and a typicality...and which are always a relation between the agent (I can) and the sensorial or ideal field.

The phenomenal layer is, literally, pre-logical and will always remain so.

By returning to phenomena, we find, as a fundamental layer, a whole already pregnant with an irreducible sense.

Every perception is the perception of something solely by way of being at the same time the relative imperception of a horizon or background which it implies but does not thematize. Perceptual consciousness is therefore indirect or even inverted in relation to an ideal of adequation which it presumes but never encounters directly.

The sensible order is being at a distance--the fulgurating attestation here and now to an inexhaustible richness.

Perception is already expression.

As the thing, as the other, the true dawns through an emotional and almost carnal experience, where the "ideas"—the other's and our own—are rather traits of his physiognomy and of our own, are less understood than welcomed or spurned in love or hatred.

The idea of institution is precisely the foundation of a personal history on the basis of contingency.

The child's consciousness is different from the adult's both in content and organization. Children are not, as previously thought, 'miniature adults.' Thus, contrary to the negative account, the child's consciousness is not identical to the adult's in everything except for its incompleteness and imperfection. The child possess another kind of equilibrium than the adult kind; therefore, we must treat the child's consciousness as a positive phenomenon.

I'd like to believe an accumulation of experience has made me a sort of a grown-up person, so I can have judgment and taste and whatever.

I think it is unnatural to think that there is such a thing as a blue-sky, white-clouded happy childhood for anybody. Childhood is a very, very tricky business of surviving it. Because if one thing goes wrong or anything goes wrong, and usually something goes wrong, then you are compromised as a human being. You're going to trip over that for a good part of your life.