Quotes About Consciousness

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.

Since things and my body are made of the same stuff, vision must somehow take place in them; their manifest visibility must be repeated in the body by a secret visibility. "Nature is on the inside," says Cézanne. Quality, light, color, depth, which are there before us, are there only because they awaken an echo in our body and because the body welcomes them.

We experience a perception and its horizon "in action" rather than by "posing" them or explicitly "knowing" them.

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.

Love cannot be given a name by the lover who lives it...If we are situated, then we are surrounded and cannot be transparent to ourselves, and thus our contact with ourselves must only be accomplished in ambiguity.

The structure of behavior is neither thing nor consciousness, and it is this which renders it opaque to the mind.

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.

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

The imaginary, said properly...is the carnal double, internal equivalent, secret figure of the real.

There has to be an ideality which has need of time.

All vision, no matter what color it may be, is a kind of thoughtscreen (which allows for the overflowing of other thoughts)-- Vorhabe and sedimentation.

The inside is seen in the outside--grasps it better than itself. Relation to the outside that is not 'representation' but ecstasy...And reciprocally, the visible is the transactions, the chemistry, the music, and interrelationship and the 'operation of interests' [Claudel] of Anima.

Obscurity spreads to the perceived world in its entirety,

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.

I feel the substance of my body escaping through my head and crossing the limits of my objective body when an ascending elevator stops abruptly.

The body is not comprehensible in the actual.

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

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

The theory of the body schema is implicitly a theory of perception. We have learned to again sense our bodies; we have discovered, beneath objective and detached knowledge of the body, this other knowledge that we have of it because it is always with us and because we are bodies. It will be necessary to similarly awaken the experience of the world such as it appears to us insofar as we are in the world through our bodies, and insofar as we perceive the world with our bodies.

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.

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

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.