Quotes About Philosophy

The paradox of history...is that a contingent future, once it enters the present, appears real and even necessary.

Painting...gives visible existence to what profane vision believes to be invisible; thanks to it we do not need a "muscular sense" in order to possess the voluminosity of the world. This voracious vision, reaching beyond the "visual givens," opens upon a texture of Being of which the discrete sensorial messages are only the punctuations or the caesurae. The eye lives in this texture as a man lives in his house.

But this 'structural' or concrete a priori is neither a Kantian category nor even a Hegelian idea; it is the universal ground of sense=the sense funally, far fro, being an idea, is a ground. Philosophy seeks in the archeology of the ground, in the depth and not in the height (the ideas)...the ground in the literal sense: the earth.

The body is not comprehensible in the actual.

Se demander si le mode est réel, ce n'est pas entendre ce que l'on dit.

Se demander si le monde et réel, ce n'est pas entendre ce que l'on dit.

What resists phenomenology within us -- natural being, the 'barbarous' source that Schelling spoke of -- cannot remain outside phenomenology and should have its place within it.

True philosophy entails learning to see the world anew, and in this sense, an historical account might signify the world with as much 'depth' as a philosophical treatise. We take our fate into our own hands and through reflection we become responsible for our own history, but this responsibility also comes from a decision to which we commit our lives; and in both cases it is a violent act whose truth is confirmed through its being performed.

The possible is the openness of the perceived world and not a system of logical Being in which we would be set up through idealization.

I can never say 'I' absolutely.

We carry in our incarnate being the alphabet & the grammar of life, but this does not presuppose an achieved meaning either in us or in it.

If to do philosophy is to discover the primary sense of being, then one does not philosophize in quitting the human situation; it is necessary rather to plunge into it. The absolute knowledge of the philosopher is perception.

The universal is not the concept but this perception given in flesh and blood.

The negative has its positive side, the positive its negative, and it is precisely because each has its contrary within itself that they are capable of passing into one another, and perpetually play the role of warring brothers in history.

Very few philosophers have been anarchists

Nature resists. It cannot be entirely established in front of us. The body is a nature at work within us.

Love is a hollow in us, not the presence of the other.

Heraclitus says that Nature is a child at play; it gives meaning, but in the manner of a child who is playing, and this meaning is never total.

Self and other are not two distinct substances...We are both, other and self, two variables of the same system.

The universe of thought, like that of perception, is lacunary and baroque in itself.

We cannot say at what moment the decision is taken: it is always to be taken or already taken.

Ambiguity cannot be resolved, but it can be understood as ultimate.

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

Love is not created by circumstances, or by decision; it consists in the way questions and answers are linked together--by means of an attraction, something more slips in, we discover not exactly what we were seekimg, but something else that is interesting.