Quotes About Existence

Nothingness is like the point of the stroboscopic spiral, which is who knows where, which is 'nobody.

What resists phenomenology within us--natural being, the 'barbarian' source Schelling spoke of--cannot remain outside phenomenology. The philosopher must bear his shadow, which is not simply the factual absence of future light.

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 inexhaustibJe and our information limited.

What do I bring to the problem of the same and the other? This: that the same be the other than the other, and identity difference of difference.

One cannot even say that one believes in the perception of the real. Belief only intervenes after a preexisting doubt, and thus it is the imaginary that we truly believe in, because our beliefs lack some support. I do not believe in this chair I see: the chair is simply there, that is all. Perception does not await proof in order to grasp an object; it is prior to careful observation. In this sense, perception, like the imagination, precedes all premises.

The subject is not so much the intelligent subject as the desiring subject.

What is given is the metamorphosis of brute being, the giving birth.

We would speak of nothing if it were only necessary to speak of that with which we coincide, since speech is already a separation. Moreover, there is no experience without speech, the purely lived is not even found within man's speaking life. But the primary sense of speech is, nevertheless, in this text of experience that it attempts to utter.

We only know what we are after we have lost it...Such is true nothingness, which is not nichtiges Nicht but Sein.

The world and others become our flesh.

The body is the seat of a certain praxis, the point from which there is something to do in the world, the register in which we are inscribed and whose inscription we continue.

The relation to the world, such as it tirelessly announces itself within us, is not something that analysis might clarify: philosophy can simply place it before our eyes and invite us to take notice.

Animality is the logos of the sensible world: an incorporated meaning.

What is Philosophy? The domain of the Verborgen (philosophy and occultism).

The abyss is not to be conceived of as lack of Being, but as more than Being.

True nothingness is not the nothing that noths, but a something always on the horizon,the positive determinations of which are the trace and absence.

From the moment of conception and still more after birth, there is an encroachment towards a future which is made from itself, under certain given conditions, and which is not the act of a donation of sense. Birth is not an act of constitution but the institution of a future. Reciprocally, institution resides in the same genus of Being as birth and is not, any more than birth, an act.

Scientific points of view are always both naïve and at the same time dishonest, because they take for granted without explicitly mentioning it, that other point of view, namely that of the consciousness, through which from the outset a world forms itself around me and begins to exist for me.

The future must not be contained in the present, but neither is it something which would be added on to the present by an a tergo necessity. The future would come from the present itself. They would continue each other.

The nature in us must have some relation to Nature outside of us; moreover, Nature outside of us must be unveiled to us by the Nature that we are.

The...present is itself a transcendent: one knows that it is not there, that it was just there, one never coincides with it--It is not a segment of time with defined contours that would come and set itself in place. It is a cycle defined by a central and dominant region and with indecisive contours--a swelling or bulb of time...an institution, a system of equivalences.

Time is never completely constituted.

Time is not a line, but rather a network of intentionalities.

Surpassing surpasses only through recurrence.