Quotes About Being

Someone will say: you explain nothing, you observe. But to explain is always: to bring Nature back to God or to bring it back to the spectacle of man—not to see nature. In reality, what one has to learn is that being is that,it is precisely not to explain.

Traumatic experience does not survive as a representation in the mode of objective consciousness and as a 'dated' moment; it is of its essence to survive only as a manner of being and with a certain degree of generality.

Transcendence means nothing outside of the notion of the 'flesh.' With the notion of the flesh, mean: there is an explosion toward the world or being. I participate in this explosion like other human bodies. This explosion is not made 'in me,' but in front of me. It is like a fuse held in front of my objective body, which the body lights itself, but which is not one of its properties: I am, along with my body, only the one who lights this conflagration.

The essences by necessity will not be the "answer" philosophy calls for, any more than are the facts. The "answer" is higher than the "facts," lower than the "essences," in the wild Being where they were, and—behind or beneath the cleavages of our acquired culture—continue to be, undivided.

I function by construction. I am installed on a pyramid of time which has been me...Time is that 'body of the spirit" Valery used to talk about. Time and thought are mutually entangled. In the dark night of thought dwells a glimmering of Being.

The philosopher speaks, but this is a weakness in him, and an inexplicable weakness: he should keep silent, coincide in silence, and rejoin in Being a philosophy that is there ready-made. But yet everything comes to pass as though he wished to put into words a certain silence he hearkens to within himself. His entire "work" is this absurd effort. He wrote in order to state his contact with Being; he did not state it, and could not state it, since it is silence. Then he recommences.. . .

What allows us to center our existence is also what prevents us from centering it completely, and the anonymity of our body is invariably both freedom and servitude. Thus, to summarize, the ambiguity of being in the world is expressed by the ambiguity of our body, and this latter is understood through the ambiguity of time.

There is not the whole of being on one side, the whole of nothingness on the other, but no more are we specialized, conditioned nothingness. Consciousness is not the flux of lived experiences, but consciousness of lacks, of open situations.

One does not love a person, one does not love a body, one loves a life established in a body.

Anyone who thinks about the matter finds it astonishing that very often a good painter can also make good drawings or good sculpture. Since neither the means of expression nor the creative gestures are comparable, this fact is proof that there is a system of equivalences, a Logos of lines, of lighting, of colors, of reliefs, of masses—a conceptless presentation of universal Being.

The perceived world is a world where there is discontinuity, where there is probability and generality, where each being is not constrained to a unique and fixed location, to an absolute density of being.

The incompleteness of the reduction is not an obstacle to the reduction, it is the reduction itself, the rediscovery of vertical being.

One cannot make a direct ontology. My 'indirect' method (being in the beings) is alone conformed with being--'negative philosophy' like 'negative theology.

The task of philosophy should be to describe this labyrinth, to elaborate a concept of being such that its contradictions, neither accepted nor "transcended," still have their place. What was impossible for modern dialectical philosophies, because the dialectic which they contained remained bound by a predialectical ontology, would become possible in an ontology which reveals in being itself an overlap or movement.

there is but the One Life—the Universal Life of God, in Whom it is an actual fact that "we live, and move, and have our being." Mineral, plant, animal, and man—all, without exception—are manifestations of God, and this fact furnishes the true basis of brotherhood—a brotherhood which includes everything from the atom to the Sun, because all are emanations from God.

I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness. Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness.

Science enhances the moral value of life, because it furthers a love of truth and reverence—love of truth displaying itself in the constant endeavor to arrive at a more exact knowledge of the world of mind and matter around us, and reverence, because every advance in knowledge brings us face to face with the mystery of our own being.

The true human being doesn't lie in the future, an object of longing, but rather it lies in the present, existing and actual. However and whoever I may be, joyful and sorrowful, a child or an old man, in confidence or doubt, asleep or awake, I am it. I am the true human being.

One has only to set a loved human being against the fact that we are all in peril all the time to get back a sense of proportion. What does anything matter compared to the reality of love and its span, so brief at best, maintained against such odds?

It was the first time in as long as I could remember that hunger wasn't a punishment or a crime or a weapon or a mode of self-destruction. It was simply a way of being in love. Sometimes

to own only a little talent . . . was an awful, plaguing thing . . . being only a little special meant you expected too much, most of the time.

If the soul knows God in creatures, night falls. If it sees how they have their being in God, morning breaks. But if it sees the Being that is in God himself alone, it is high noon! See! This is what one ought to desire with mad fervor—that all his life should become Being.

If anyone went on for a thousand years asking of life: 'Why are you living?' life, if it could answer, would only say, 'I live so that I may live.' That is because life lives out of its own ground and springs from its own source, and so it lives without asking why it is itself living.

As long as I am this or that, I am not all things.