Quotes About Existence

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.

We situate ourselves in ourselves and in the things, in ourselves and in the other, and at the point where, by a sort of chiasm, we become the others and we become the world.

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.

A 'world' has dimensions. By definition they are not the sole possible ones.

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

It is the unconscious which chooses what aspect of us will be admitted to official existence.

The imaginary is lodged in the world.

What exists are not separated animals, but an inter-animality.

Freedom exists in contact with the world, not outside it.

Language is everything, since it is the voice of no one, since it is the very voice of things, the waves and the forests.

Man is hidden, well hidden, & this time we must make no mistake about it: this does not mean that he is there beneath a mask, ready to appear ... the situation is more serious: there are no faces underneath the masks, historical man has never been human, & yet no man is alone.

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.

There are several ways for a body to be a body, and several ways for consciousness to be consciousness.

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.

We are in the world, mingled with it, compromised with it.

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.

Life is not a sort of quasi-interiority, it is only a fold, the reality of a process, as Whitehead would say, in observable up close.

Visible being is natural...But language, art, history gravitate around the invisible (ideality).