Quotes About Understanding

To speak or to write is truly to translate an experience which, without the word that it inspires, would not become a text.

The perception of forms, understood very broadly as structure, grouping, or configuration should be considered our spontaneous way of seeing.

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

It is true that we discover the unreflected. But the unreflected we go back to is not that which is prior to philosophy or prior to reflection. It is the unreflected which is understood and conquered by reflection.

Experience anticipates a philosophy and philosophy is but an elucidated experience.

It would be a mistake to believe that psychoanalysis, even for Freud, excludes the description of psychological motives and is opposed to the phenomenological method. Psychoanalysis has, on the contrary (and unwittingly), contributed to developing the phenomenological method by claiming, as Freud puts it, that every human act 'has a sense,' and by seeking everywhere to understand the event rather than to tie it to mechanical conditions.

Expressing what exists is an endless task.

There is a fitting together of different perspectival views; there is no fitting together of all of them in an absolute knowledge which is completely decentered and final...The passage from the particular to the universal is never finished.

Through other eyes we are for ourselves fully visible.

Someone will say: you explain nothing, you observe. But to explain is always: to bring Nature back to God or to bring it back to the spectacle of man—not to see nature. In reality, what one has to learn is that being is that,it is precisely not to explain.

Rather than imprisoning it, language is like a magic machine for transporting the 'I' into the other person's perspective.

When I am listening, it is not necessary that I have an auditory perception of the articulated sounds but that the conversation pronounces itself within me. It summons me and grips me; it envelops and inhabits me to the point that I cannot tell what comes from me and what from it. Whether speaking or listening, I project myself into the other person, I introduce him into my own self.

Signs do not simply evoke other signs for us and so on without end, and language is not like a prison we are locked into or a guide we must blindly follow; for what these linguistic gestures mean and gain us such complete access to that we seem to have no further need of them to refer to it finally appears at the intersection of all of them.

We would not know even what the false is, if there were not times when we had distinguished it from the true...If we are to be able to speak of falsity, we do have to have experiences of truth.

We inherit powers which are not immediately ours. I record the results of an activity of which I am not a part.

The manner in which the child assumes his relations with the family constellation can be read in the type of perception and knowledge that he accomplishes.

Method proper to the understanding of dreams: reverie over dreams, hermeneutics reverie. Because it is not something said, but an echo through totality. It is this system of echoes which also constitutes the oneirism of wakefulness.

I live in the facial expressions of the other, as I feel him living in mine.

To love is to affirm more than one can know.

Concepts for a philosopher are only nets for catching sense.

Sedimentation is: trace of the forgotten and thereby a call to thought which depends upon itself and goes farther...It is the experience of a resumption which is not totalization, and which precisely for that reason is able to open another development of knowledge.

Consciousness of something is always consciousness of a difference between terms that are not given positively.

The moment that one understands time as chiasm then past and present are Ineinaander, each enveloping-enveloped--and that itself is the flesh.

Since sane people find the insane impenetrable and irreducible, they consider themselves the sole owners of rationality.