Quotes About Existence

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

Silent speech through which the thing dengt and the world Weltet .

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.

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.

The body is not comprehensible in the actual.

There is a paradox here: the paradox of a total being which is, in advance, everything which we can be and do, and yet which would not be it without us, and which thus needs to be augmented by our own being. Our relation with being involves a double sense, the first according to which we belong to it, the second according to which it belongs to us.

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

It is not we who perceive, it is the thing that perceives itself yonder.

Essence and existence, imaginary and real, visible and invisible -- painting scrambles all our categories, spreading out before us its oneiric universe of carnal essences, actualized resemblances, mute meanings.

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.

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.

The perceived world is the always presupposed foundation of all rationality, all value and all existence. This thesis does not destroy either rationality or the absolute. It only tries to bring them down to earth.

As the parts of my body together comprise a system, so my body and the other's are one whole, two sides of one and the same phenomenon, and the anonymous existence of which my body is the ever-renewed trace henceforth inhabits both bodies simultaneously.

Are the limits between the ''inside'' and the "outside" so clear?

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.

Perception grounds everything because it shows us, so to speak, an obsessional relation with being; it is there before us, and yet it touches us from within.

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

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

Language is the system of differentiations through which the individual articulates his relation to the world.

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.

What makes the weight, the density, the flesh of each color, each sound, each tactile texture, of the present and the world is that he who grasps them feels himself emerge from them by a sort of coiling up or redoubling, fundamentally homogenous with them, that he is the sensible coming to itself and that in return the sensible is to his eyes lime the double or an expression of his flesh.

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