Quotes About Meaning

This is where the mystification of institution comes from: as knowledge, it is necessary that institution is also ignorance, as ignorance (of its actual functioning) institution is also the knowledge of it (since it is in history as use value).

Socrates reminds us that it is not the same thing, but almost the opposite, to understand religion and to accept it.

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 awareness of truth advances like a crab, turned towardits point of departure, toward that structure whose signification it expresses.

Pathological behavior also has meaning. Illness is auto-regulation, an establishment of an equilibrium to a level other than the normal one. It is not a totally incomprehensible one...The normal and the pathological can be considerably enriched by contact with one another.

An expression and what it expresses strangely alternate and, through a sort of false recognition, make us feel that the word has inhabited the thing from all eternity...One of the effects of language is to efface itself to the extent that its expression comes across.

But therein lies the virtue of language: it is language which propels us toward the things it signifies. In the way it works, language hides itself from us. Its triumph is to efface itself and to take us beyond the words to the author's very thoughts, so that we imagine we are engaged with him in a wordless meeting of minds.

We may say that there are two languages. First, there is language after the fact, or language as an institution, which effaces itself in order to yield the meaning which it conveys. Second, there is the language which creates itself in its expressive acts, which sweeps me on from the signs toward meaning—sedimented language and speech.

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.

One does not write solely for oneself, or solely for truth, but not simply for others either. One writes. That is all, and in doing so one aims at all of that at once. Those who write imply that all of this can happen in the same movement.

I cut straight through the scribbling to the book, because I have built up in myself a strange expressive organism which can not only interpret the conventional meaning of the book's words and techniques but can even allow itself to be transformed and endowed with new organs by the book.

What lives in Nature is not mind or spirit, but rather the beginning of meaning in the process of ordering itself, but which has not fully emerged. The subject has to intervene in order to bring meaning out fully, but this disengagement of meaning is not constituting.

Philosophy...is a question....The human being is a question for God himself. We are not masters of this question.

What if language expresses as much by what is between words as by words themselves? By that which it does not "say" as by what it "says"? And what if, hidden in empirical language, there is a second-order language in which signs once again lead the vague life of colors, and in which significations never free themselves completely from the intercourse of signs?

The natural 'thing,' the organism, the behavior of others and my own behavior exist only by their meaning; but this meaning which springs forth in them is not yet a Kantian object; the intentional life which constitutes them is not yet a representation; and the 'comprehension' which gives access to them is not yet an intellection.

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

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.

People would be very unhappy if they were to look closely at what lies beneath the words they use so readily. This is why they prefer, for the most part, not to do so.

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.

Vertical and horizontal are not grasped for themselves but in the divergence of things from them. Thus as levels. Perception of them is imperception: it's when they're destroyed that we feel them, when they function they're what we take for granted. Therefore perceptual sense = divergence with respect to a level that is not thematic. Therefore meaning here is not essence.

To speak or to write is truly to translate an experience which, without the word that it inspires, would not become a text.

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.

The possibility of a universal grammar thus remains problematic, since language is made up of significations in the state of being born. This is the case because language is in movement and is not fixed.

Love is not created by circumstances, or by decision; it consists in the way questions and answers are linked together--by means of an attraction, something more slips in, we discover not exactly what we were seekimg, but something else that is interesting.