Quotes About Philosophy

I found in the experience of the perceived world a new type of relation between the mind and truth...We experience in it a truth which shows through and envelops us rather than being held and circumscribed by our mind.

Philosophy...is a question....The human being is a question for God himself. We are not masters of this question.

Circularity--a dangerous word. Circularity of Heraclitus, yes: to go in one direction is truly to go in the other. A thick identity there, which truly contains difference.

There is no absolute 'in-itself,' and no absolute 'for us'—for the same reasons, i.e., their reciprocal relativization, their 'mutual coincidence.' -From Philosophy and Non-Philosophy Since Hegel

The (ultimate) formula: 'the absolute is the subject' does not mean that there is only a subject. The 'free' is freedom of the free and the related. The absolute is the 'sameness' of the absolute and the relative. The true subject is the subjectivity of the subject and the object. -From Philosophy and Non-Philosophy Since Hegel

True philosophy does not go 'behind:' behind the 'appearance' and behind what is in the world. Philosophy cannot conceive the absolute except as the other side of the 'appearance' or the phenomenon. -From Philosophy and Non-Philosophy Since Hegel

Dialectic is not a property of consciousness, rather consciousness is the property of dialectic. Dialectic has consciousness. -From Philosophy and Non-Philosophy Since Hegel

No more than the sky or the earth is the horizon a collection of things held together, or a class name, or a logical possibility of conception, or a system of 'potentiality of consciousness': it is a new type of being, a being by porosity, or by generality, and the one before whom the horizon opens is caught up, englobed, within it.

Since things and my body are made of the same stuff, vision must somehow take place in them; their manifest visibility must be repeated in the body by a secret visibility. "Nature is on the inside," says Cézanne. Quality, light, color, depth, which are there before us, are there only because they awaken an echo in our body and because the body welcomes them.

What if language expresses as much by what is between words as by words themselves? By that which it does not "say" as by what it "says"? And what if, hidden in empirical language, there is a second-order language in which signs once again lead the vague life of colors, and in which significations never free themselves completely from the intercourse of signs?

In the movement of experience, which brings understanding, we reach the absolute which is not something behind it or under it, but which is a water-mark within it and which exists only as a water-mark. -From Philosophy and Non-Philosophy Since Hegel

The structure of behavior is neither thing nor consciousness, and it is this which renders it opaque to the mind.

My possession of my own time is always deferred until the moment when I fully understand myself, but that moment can never arrive...in short, I am never at one with myself.

Ambiguity is not a lack of univocity. Ambiguity is 'good'...In truth, we have experience of knowledge and knowledge of experience. These two faces of ambiguity are abstractions. The absolute is that which is between the two: the transformation of one into the other. -From Philosophy and Non-Philosophy Since Hegel

Time and space are horizons and not series of things. And horizons that overlap, one over the other. I read time in space and read space in time. A single great differentiation of a single Being.

In all dialogue there is an element of concrete universality.

How to rediscover the emerging sense of philosophy? By expanding our thoughts, our lived situation of the philosopher through those of the ancients, and those of the ancients by ours. This reciprocal contestation unveils the common field of which philosophies are only sections.

The imaginary, said properly...is the carnal double, internal equivalent, secret figure of the real.

There has to be an ideality which has need of time.

It is not true that everything is actual; there is an actuality of the possible as possible, that is, the notion of an outline, the being of becoming actual that is certain possibilities.

All vision, no matter what color it may be, is a kind of thoughtscreen (which allows for the overflowing of other thoughts)-- Vorhabe and sedimentation.

The objective body is not the truth of the phenomenal body, that is, the truth of the body such as we experience it. The objective body is merely an impoverished image of the phenomenal body...which has merely a conceptual existence.

Our open and personal existence rests upon an initial foundation of acquired and congealed existence.

In between the microscopic facts, global reality is delineated like a watermark, never graspable for objectivizing-particularizing thinking, never eliminate from or reducible to the microscopic: we had only a bit of protoplasmic jelly, and we then have an embryo, by a transformation which, always too early or too late, we were never witness to in our investment in a biological field.