Quotes About Philosophy

Philosophy is not a hospital. If people are vertiginous and want to take medication against it, I don't stop them, but I say: this is medication.

The wonderful thing about language is that it promotes its own oblivion.

We do not have a choice between purity and violence but between different kinds of violence. Inasmuch as we are incarnate beings, violence is our lot.

We become used to thinking that all of this exists necessarily and unshakeably.

Each one of us knows for his own part that the world as it is, is unacceptable.

If at the center and so to speak the kernel of Being there is an infinite infinite, every partial being directly or indirectly presupposes it, and is in return really or eminently contained in it. All the relationships we can have to Being must be simultaneously founded upon it.

To think is not having but not having.

I rediscover the world - which I had distinguished from myself as a sum of things or of processes tied together through causal relations - 'in myself' as the permanent horizon of all of my thoughts and as a dimension in relation to which I never cease situating myself.

W)e must - precisely in order to see the world and to grasp it as a paradox - rupture our familiarity with it, and this rupture can teach us nothing except the unmotivated springing forth of the world.

Some think that the painting does not so much express the meaning as the meaning impregnates the painting.

N)o explanatory hypothesis is more clear than the very act by which we take up this incomplete world in order to attempt to totalize it and to think it.

This passage from the indeterminate to the determinate, this continuous taking up again of its own history in the unity of a new sense, is thought itself.

How could it limit its investigation to one sector of reality? How could it help being pluralistic? How could it help finding the same truth everywhere?

Being is not given but rather emerges over time.

I am, as a sensing subject, full of natural powers of which I am the first to be filled with wonder. Thus I am not, to recall Hegel's phrase, a 'hole in being,' but rather a hollow, or a fold that was made and that can be unmade.

From the moment we do something, we turn toward the world, stop self-questioning, and go beyond ourselves in our action. Faith--in the sense of an unreserved commitment which is never completely justified--enters the picture as soon as we leave the realm of pure geometrical ideas and have to deal with the existing world. Each of our perceptions is an act of faith in that it affirms more than we strictly know, since objects are inexhaustible and our information limited.

To the extent that consciousness is only consciousness of something by allowing its wake to trail behind itself, and to the extent that, to think an object, consciousness must rely upon a previously constructed 'world of thought,' there is always a de personalization at the heart of consciousness.

There is a temporal style of the world, and time remains the same because the past is a former future and a recent present, the present an impending past and a recent future, the future a present and even a past to come; because, that is, each dimension of time is treated or aimed at as something other than itself and because, finally, there is at the core of time a gaze.

There is an intemporal which works on the inside of time, which is, rather, omnitemporal.

Instead of an intelligible world there are radiant nebulae separated by expanses of darkness.

Phenomenological or existential philosophy assigns itself the task, not of explaining the world or of discovering its "conditions of possibility," but rather of formulating an experience of the world, a contact with the world which precedes all thought about the world.

From now on the tasks of literature and philosophy can no longer be separated. When one is concerned with giving voice to the experience of the world and showing how consciousness escapes into the world, one can no longer credit oneself with attaining a perfect transparence of expression. Philosophical expression assumes the same ambiguities as literary expression, if the world is such that it cannot be expressed except in "stories" and, as it were, pointed at.

Now if we rid our minds of the idea that our language is the translation or cipher of an original text, we shall see that the idea of a complete expression is nonsensical, and that all language is indirect or allusive--that is, if you wish, silence.

It belongs to the real to contract an infinity of relations into each of its moments.