Quotes About Understanding

Language transcends us and yet we speak.

To ask for an explanation is to explain the obscure by the more obscure.

I will never know how you see red and you will never know how I see it. But this separation of consciousness is recognized only after a failure of communication, and our first movement is to believe in an undivided being between us.

We will arrive at the universal not by abandoning our particularity but by turning it into a way of reaching others, by virtue of that mysterious affinity which makes situations mutually understandable.

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

I discover vision, not as a "thinking about seeing," to use Descartes expression, but as a gaze at grips with a visible world, and that is why for me there can be another's gaze.

A science without philosophy would literally not know what it was talking about. A philosophy without methodological exploration of phenomena would end up with nothing but formal truths, which is to say, errors.

We know not through our intellect but through our Experience

The swimmer unknowingly skims over a whole buried universe which would frighten him if he looked at it with undersea goggles.

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

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

There is already a kind of presence of the other in me.

The wonderful thing about language is that it promotes its own oblivion.

Everything is science and everything is philosophy.

N)o explanatory hypothesis is more clear than the very act by which we take up this incomplete world in order to attempt to totalize it and to think it.

This passage from the indeterminate to the determinate, this continuous taking up again of its own history in the unity of a new sense, is thought itself.

If we want to both inhabit our body and know it, we must be simultaneously ourselves and another.

We only know what we are after we have lost it...Such is true nothingness, which is not nichtiges Nicht but Sein.

What is Philosophy? The domain of the Verborgen (philosophy and occultism).

It is a paradox to not want to infringe upon the will of the loved being. To love is to accept undergoing the other's influence and also to exercise influence on the other.

The nature in us must have some relation to Nature outside of us; moreover, Nature outside of us must be unveiled to us by the Nature that we are.

Signification is always the divergence: what the other says appears to me to be full of meaning because his lacunae are never where mine are. Perspective multiplicity.

We all secretly venerate the ideal of a language which in the last analysis would deliver us from language by delivering us to things.

The living physiology of the nervous system can only be understood by starting from phenomenal givens.