Quotes About Being

Time is never completely constituted.

Perception, which is an event, opens onto the thing perceived, which appeared to be prior to perception and to be true before it. And if perception always reaffirms the preexistence of the world, it is precisely because it is an event, because the subject who perceives is already at grips with being through the perceptual fields, the "senses.

Surpassing surpasses only through recurrence.

In the horizon, there is no subject and object. We are there like the others; we are, like the others, drawn out of this horizonal being, divergences or variants in relation to it.

My organism--as a pre-personal adhesion to the general form of the world, as an anonymous and general existence--plays the role of an innate complex beneath the level of my personal life. My organism is not like some inert thing, it itself sketches out the movement of existence.

Institution...is neither perceived nor thought as a concept. It is the wherewithal on which I count at eh moment, which is seen nowhere and is assumed by everything that is visible for a human beimg, it is what is at issue each moment and which has no name and no identity in our theories of consciousness.

Personal existence is intermittent

Existence turning back upon itself but without succeeding in carrying itself away.

Perhaps ultimate knowledge is a knowledge-question, the interrogative mode proper to Being...Being, in other words, is the mute interlocutor of our questions, that which makes way for our interrogation and which our answers do not contain since they take the enigma away from it.

The person himself must be understood as institution, not as consciousness of...

I do not perceive any more than I speak--Perception has me as has language--And as it is necessary that all the same I be there in order to speak, I must be there in order to perceive--But in what sense? As one--What is it that, from my side, comes to animate the perceived world and language?

Truth is not an adequation but anticipation, repetition, and slippage of meaning. Truth allows itself to be reached only through a sort of distance. The thing thought is not the thing perceived. Knowledge is not perception, speech is not one gesture among all the other gestures. For speech is the vehicle of our movement toward truth, as the body is the vehicle of our being in the world.

What dreams in us is our existential field.

L'Être est ce qui exige de nous création pour que nous en ayons l'expérience.

Lebenswely = ...wild being and wild mind--'mute' experience that must itself speak.

Philosophy, precisely as 'Being speaking within us,' expression of the mute experience by itself, is creation. A creation that is at the same time a reintegration of Being...for...it knows itself to be a Gebilde and wishes to surpass itself as pure Gebilde, to find again its origin. It is hence a creation in a radical sense: a creation that is at the same time an adequation, the only way to obtain an adequation...Being is what requires creation of us for us to experience it.

Another person, for us, is a spirit which haunts a body and we seem to see a whole host of possibilities contained within this body when it appears before us; the body is the very presence of these possibilities.

Verflechtung(interweaving, entanglement with others). Means finally: We are not one side of the wall but two. And finally: We are not perspectives upon a surveyor's plan (for then one would not understand substitution). We are two in one Being. Make a chapter in my book: Being and Memory (memory as a particular case of inter-being).

No more than the sky or the earth is the horizon a collection of things held together, or a class name, or a logical possibility of conception, or a system of 'potentiality of consciousness': it is a new type of being, a being by porosity, or by generality, and the one before whom the horizon opens is caught up, englobed, within it.

Each perception is a vibration of the world, it touches well beyond what it touches, it awakens echoes in all my being in the world, it is super-significant.

The thing offers itself as preliminary, primordial, anterior to all perception, like a landscape that is there before us and just as we will see it afterward...But at the same time, I can posit this universe anterior to me only as I perceive it...Bergson thus posits consciously a paradox inherent to perception: Being is anterior to perception, and this primordial Being is conceivable only in relation to perception.

My possession of my own time is always deferred until the moment when I fully understand myself, but that moment can never arrive...in short, I am never at one with myself.

Time and space are horizons and not series of things. And horizons that overlap, one over the other. I read time in space and read space in time. A single great differentiation of a single Being.

To be conscious is, among other things, to be somewhere else.