Quotes About Existence

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.

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.

If we want to both inhabit our body and know it, we must be simultaneously ourselves and another.

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

An abyss is not nothing; it has environs & edges.

This is an encounter between the human and the non-human, it is something like a behavior of the world.

We might say that we perceive the things themselves, that we are the world that thinks itself--or that the world is at the heart of our flesh.

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

Matter is 'pregnant' with its form.

For us the essential is to know precisely what the being of the world means. Here we must presuppose nothing—neither the naïve idea of being in itself, therefore, nor the correlative idea of a being of representation, of a being for the consciousness, of a being for man: these, along with the being of the world, are all notions that we have to rethink with regard to our experience of the world.

But where are these reference events and these landmarks themselves? They refer us to others, and the answer satisfies us only because we do not attend to it, because we think we are 'at home.' The question would arise again and indeed would be inexhaustible, almost insane, if we wished to situate our levels, measure our standards in their turn, if we were to ask: but where is the world itself? And why am I myself? Am I really alone to be me? Have I not somewhere a double, a twin?

There is no sphere of immanence, no realm in which my consciousness is fully at home and secure against all risk of error.

The 'healthy' man is not so much the one who has eliminated his contradictions as the one who makes use of them and drags them into his vital labors.

The unfurling of the animal is like a pure wake that is related to no boat.

There is a kinship between the concepts of nature and radical contingency.

There is no more individuated being in the system. We only ever have to deal with families of trajectories.

The generality of time, of a family of times, is derived from the fact that all these times are enveloped in a process of nature.

Moonlight and sunlight in our memory are presented before all else, not as sensory contents, but as a certain type of symbiosis, a certain manner that the outside has of invading us, a certain manner that we have of receiving it.

There is not identity, nor non-identity, or non-coincidence, there is inside and outside turning about one another.