Quotes About Connection

There is no universal clock, but local histories take form beneath our eyes, and begin to regulate themselves, and haltingly are linked to one another and demand to live, and confirm the powerful in the wisdom which the immensity of the risks and the consciousness of their own disorder had given them. The world is more present to itself in all its parts than it ever was.

We are in the world, mingled with it, compromised with it.

There is an adherence, a strange kinship between the human and the animal...of the animal as variant of humanity and of humanity as variant of animality.

To say "Hell is other people" does not mean "Heaven is me." If other people are the instruments of our torture, it is first and foremost because they are indispensable to our salvation. We are so intermingled with them that we must make what order we can out of this chaos.

O que constitui um enigma é a sua ligação, é o que está entre elas – é o facto de eu ver as coisas no seu devido lugar, precisamente porque elas se eclipsam umas às outras –, é o serem rivais perante o meu olhar, precisamente porque cada uma está no seu lugar.

This is an encounter between the human and the non-human, it is something like a behavior of the world.

There is a knowledge of place which is reducible to a sort of co-existence with that place, and which is not simply nothing, even though it cannot be conveyed by a description.

The unfurling of the animal is like a pure wake that is related to no boat.

There is a kinship between the concepts of nature and radical contingency.

There is no more individuated being in the system. We only ever have to deal with families of trajectories.

The world and others become our flesh.

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.

Time is not a line, but rather a network of intentionalities.

We perceive others as reflections and at the same time as lacunae in relation to ourselves. In effect, it is like a forbidden zone...With others, it will always be impossible to perceive them in their totalities--that is, to perceive them as they perceive themselves.

The unthought can only appear through contact.

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

But therein lies the virtue of language: it is language which propels us toward the things it signifies. In the way it works, language hides itself from us. Its triumph is to efface itself and to take us beyond the words to the author's very thoughts, so that we imagine we are engaged with him in a wordless meeting of minds.

I bring the match near, I light a flimsy piece of paper, and, behold, my gesture receives inspired help from the things around, as if the chimney and the dry wood had been waiting for me to set the light, or as though the match had been nothing but a magic incantation, a call of like to like answered beyond all imagination.

I am receiving and giving in the same gesture.

We are the parents of a Nature of which we are also the children

Verflechtung(interweaving, entanglement with others). Means finally: We are not one side of the wall but two. And finally: We are not perspectives upon a surveyor's plan (for then one would not understand substitution). We are two in one Being. Make a chapter in my book: Being and Memory (memory as a particular case of inter-being).

Our glances are not "acts of consciousness," each of which claims an invariable priority, but openings of our flesh which are immediately filled by the universal flesh of the world.

Relations with the other are always complicated...Even if we make an effort to respect the autonomy of the other, even if we grant the other freedom, the other will never feel completely free since he receives his freedom in a partnership.