Quotes About Philosophy

The world and I are within one another.

If this world is a poem, it is not because we see the meaning of it at first but on the strength of its chance occurrences and paradoxes.

It is the essence of certainty to be established only with reservations.

The perceived world is the always-presupposed foundation of all rationality, all value, and all existence.

the real is coherent and probable because it is real, not real because it is coherent...

We are caught in a secret history, in a forest of symbols.

Perhaps the truth is simply that one would need many lives to enter each realm of experience with the total abandon it demands.

I discover vision, not as a "thinking about seeing," to use Descartes expression, but as a gaze at grips with a visible world, and that is why for me there can be another's gaze.

Philosophy: circles that include one another.

Revolutions are true as movements and false as regimes.

Speech is not a means in the service of an external end. It contains its own rule of usage, ethics, and view of the world, as a gesture sometimes bears the whole truth about a man.

We speak of 'inspiration,' and the word should be taken literally. There really is inspiration and expiration of Being.

The world and Being hold together only in movement; it is only in this way that all things can be together. Philosophy is a reminding of this being.

Philosophy is a will to confront human artifice with its outside, with Nature.

A science without philosophy would literally not know what it was talking about. A philosophy without methodological exploration of phenomena would end up with nothing but formal truths, which is to say, errors.

So it is fairly widely recognised that the relationship between human beings and things is no longer one of distance and mastery such as that which obtained between the sovereign mind and the piece of wax in Descartes' famous description. Rather, the relationship is less clear-cut: vertiginous proximity prevents us both from apprehending ourselves as a pure intellect separate from things and from defining things as pure objects lacking in all human attributes.

the real is coherent and probable because it is real, and not real because it is coherent...

Rather than a mind and a body, man is a mind with a body, a being who can only get to the truth of things because its body is, as it were, embedded in those things.

What we call 'natural' is frequently no more than bad theory.

The words most charged with philosophy are not necessarily those that contain what they say, but rather those that most energetically open upon Being, because they more closely convey the life of the whole and make our habitual evidences vibrate until they disjoin.

This swarming of words behind words, thoughts behind thoughts--this universal substitution is also a kind of stability.

The imaginary is lodged in the world.

In advocating nonviolence one reinforces established violence.

If I wanted to express perceptual experience with precision, I would have to say that one perceives in me, and not that I perceive. Every sensation includes a seed of dream or depersonalization, as we experience through this sort of stupor into which it puts us when we truly live at the level of sensation.