Quotes About Reality

The world is... the natural setting of, and field for, all my thoughts and all my explicit perceptions. Truth does not inhabit only the inner man, or more accurately, there is no inner man, man is in the world, and only in the world does he know himself.

Because we are in the world, we are condemned to meaning, and we cannot do or say anything without its acquiring a name in history.

The phenomenological world is not the bringing to explicit expression of a pre-existing being, but the laying down of being. Philosophy is not the reflection of a pre-existing truth, but, like art, the act of bringing truth into being.

The flesh is at the heart of the world.

The perceived world is the always-presupposed foundation of all rationality, all value, and all existence.

the real is coherent and probable because it is real, not real because it is coherent...

The number and richness of man's signifiers always surpasses the set of defined objects that could be termed signifieds. The symbolic function must always precede its object and does not encounter reality except when it precedes it into the imaginary…

The world is inseparable from the subject, but from a subject which is nothing but a project of the world, and the subject is inseparable from the world, but from a world which the subject itself projects.

We are caught in a secret history, in a forest of symbols.

the real is coherent and probable because it is real, and not real because it is coherent...

What we call 'natural' is frequently no more than bad theory.

A 'world' has dimensions. By definition they are not the sole possible ones.

We struggle with dream figures and our blows fall on living faces.

The imaginary is lodged in the world.

If I wanted to express perceptual experience with precision, I would have to say that one perceives in me, and not that I perceive. Every sensation includes a seed of dream or depersonalization, as we experience through this sort of stupor into which it puts us when we truly live at the level of sensation.

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

Each one of us knows for his own part that the world as it is, is unacceptable.

If at the center and so to speak the kernel of Being there is an infinite infinite, every partial being directly or indirectly presupposes it, and is in return really or eminently contained in it. All the relationships we can have to Being must be simultaneously founded upon it.

Life is not a sort of quasi-interiority, it is only a fold, the reality of a process, as Whitehead would say, in observable up close.

How could it limit its investigation to one sector of reality? How could it help being pluralistic? How could it help finding the same truth everywhere?

From the moment we do something, we turn toward the world, stop self-questioning, and go beyond ourselves in our action. Faith--in the sense of an unreserved commitment which is never completely justified--enters the picture as soon as we leave the realm of pure geometrical ideas and have to deal with the existing world. Each of our perceptions is an act of faith in that it affirms more than we strictly know, since objects are inexhaustible and our information limited.

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.

Instead of an intelligible world there are radiant nebulae separated by expanses of darkness.

philosophy is not a lexicon, it is not concerned with "word-meanings", it does not seek a verbal substitute for the world we see, it does not transform it into something said, it does not install itself in the order of the said or of the written as does the logician in the proposition, the poet in the word, or the musician in the music. It is the things themselves, from the depths of their silence, that it wishes to bring to expression.