Quotes About Truth

Psychological reflection, however, obliges us to place the precise world back into its cradle of consciousness, to ask ourselves how the very idea of the precise world or of precise truth is possible, and to seek out its first springing forth into consciousness. (...) Consciousness must be brought face to face with its unreflective life in things and must awaken to its own, forgotten, history - this is the true role of philosophical reflection.

Everything is offered up to a truth that is emergent and possessed by anyone. The delicate point is that this truth should be realized neither beyond the world, as it is by those who go to Mass, nor on this side of it, as it is for the Marxists.

The question is to know whether, as Sartre says, there are only humans and things or whether there is also the interworld, which we call history, symbolism, truth-to-be-made.

The truth of a social system lies in the type of human relations it makes possible.

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

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.

Thus the highest point of truth is still only perspective.

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 found in the experience of the perceived world a new type of relation between the mind and truth...We experience in it a truth which shows through and envelops us rather than being held and circumscribed by our mind.

The contact with the perceived is not ignorance and is not knowledge.

True philosophy does not go 'behind:' behind the 'appearance' and behind what is in the world. Philosophy cannot conceive the absolute except as the other side of the 'appearance' or the phenomenon. -From Philosophy and Non-Philosophy Since Hegel

Perception teaches us an ontology that it alone can reveal to us.

Thus the problem of Einfühlung, like that of my incarnation, opens on the meditation of sensible being; or, if you prefer, it betakes itself there. The fact is that sensible being, which is announced to me in my strictly private life, summons up within that life all other corporeality - It is the being which reaches me in my most secret parts, but which I also reach in its brute or untamed state, in an absolute of presence which holds the secret of the world , others, and what is true.

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

Those who resisted were neither madmen nor wise men; they were heroes—men in whom passion and reason were identical, who in the obscurity of desire did what history expected and what was later to appear as the truth of the moment. We cannot remove the element of reason in their choice any more than the element of audacity and risk of failure.

The objective body is not the truth of the phenomenal body, that is, the truth of the body such as we experience it. The objective body is merely an impoverished image of the phenomenal body...which has merely a conceptual existence.

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.

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.

True philosophy entails learning to see the world anew, and in this sense, an historical account might signify the world with as much 'depth' as a philosophical treatise. We take our fate into our own hands and through reflection we become responsible for our own history, but this responsibility also comes from a decision to which we commit our lives; and in both cases it is a violent act whose truth is confirmed through its being performed.

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).

Memory deforms reality, which nevertheless is formed as reality only in memory

Ambiguity cannot be resolved, but it can be understood as ultimate.

Our ideas, however limited they may be at a given moment—since they always express our contact with being and with culture—are capable of being true provided we keep them open to the field of nature and culture which they must express. And this possibility is always open to us, just because we are temporal.