Quotes About Thought

He sensed that this thought was not actually common to them, but rather that they would be in common only in this thought.

In the world which we know, among the different and primitive geniuses that preside over the evolution of the several species, there exists not one, excepting that of the dog, that ever gave a thought to the presence of man.

Bees will not work except in darkness; Thought will not work except in Silence; neither will Virtue Work except in secrecy.

Silence is the element in which great things fashion themselves together ... Speech is too often ... the act of quite stifling and suspending thought, so that there is none to conceal ... Speech is of Time, silence is of Eternity ... It is idle to think that, by means of words, any real communication can ever pass from one man to another ...

A thought that is almost beautiful – a thought that you speak not, but that you cherish within you at this moment, will irradiate you as though you were a transparent vase.

It is well to believe that there needs but a little more thought, a little more courage, more love, more devotion to life, a little more eagerness, one day to fling open wide the portals of joy and of truth.

Are we to believe that earth marks the most advanced stage and the most favoured experiment? What, then, can the thought of the universe have done and against what darkness must it have struggled, to have come no farther than this?

All thought of something is at the same time self-consciousness [...] At the root of all our experiences and all our reflections, we find [...] a being which immediately recognises itself, [...] and which knows its own existence, not by observation and as a given fact, nor by inference from any idea of itself, but through direct contact with that existence. Self-consciousness is the very being of mind in action.

We become used to thinking that all of this exists necessarily and unshakeably.

To think is not having but not having.

To the extent that consciousness is only consciousness of something by allowing its wake to trail behind itself, and to the extent that, to think an object, consciousness must rely upon a previously constructed 'world of thought,' there is always a de personalization at the heart of consciousness.

Phenomenological or existential philosophy assigns itself the task, not of explaining the world or of discovering its "conditions of possibility," but rather of formulating an experience of the world, a contact with the world which precedes all thought about the world.

Stiftung is not enveloping thought, but open thought, not the intended and Vorhabe of an actual center, but an 'off-center' which will be rectified, not the positing of an end, but the positing of a style, not a frontal grasp but a lateral divergence, algae brought back from the depths.

To think: to encircle an unthought.

The unthought can only appear through contact.

Dialectic is not a property of consciousness, rather consciousness is the property of dialectic. Dialectic has consciousness. -From Philosophy and Non-Philosophy Since Hegel

The life of thought transforms its own notions. Would not a thought in equilibrium actually be an absence of thought? Thought should be known in states of equilibrium, but in relative and nonfinal states of equilibrium. We know that our most profound convictions will be completed and modified by our future experiences. All equilibrium of thought contains in itself an evolutionary seef.

My own words take me by surprise and teach me what to think.

If Nature is not an object of thought, that is, a simple correlate of a thought, it is decidedly not a subject either, and for the same reason: its opacity, its enveloping. It is an obscure principle.

It is a question not of putting the perceptual faith in place of reflection, but on the contrary of taking into account the total situation, which involves reference from the one to the other. What is given is not a massive and opaque world, or a universe of adequate thought; it is a reflection which turns back over the density of the world in order to clarify it, but which, coming second, reflects back to it only its own light.

Superficial conceptualizations, positivist determinations of a great truth: there is the id as perception that is imperception, nonconventional thought (and not hidden adequate thought); there is the ego, the perception-consciousness apparatus, like a system of attitudes which avoid, bypass the id--(without going so far as to be consciousness of the unconscious).

Language is a surpassing, operated by the subject on significations he has laid down, stimulated by the use made of words around him. Language is an act of transcending. Thus, we cannot consider it to simply be a container of thought; we must see in it an instrument of conquest of self through contact with others.

The universe of thought, like that of perception, is lacunary and baroque in itself.

Nature is what has a meaning, without this meaning being posited by thought: it is the autoproduction of meaning.