Quotes About Reflection

The relation to the world, such as it tirelessly announces itself within us, is not something that analysis might clarify: philosophy can simply place it before our eyes and invite us to take notice.

All writers who are unprejudiced and open to the future know what they do not want better than what they do want.

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.

Existence turning back upon itself but without succeeding in carrying itself away.

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

What does it mean to think?: we rediscover a path that the thing has already traversed.

Infantile prehistory does not remain inert in the adult. Rather, infantile prehistory is perpetually re-created by the adult's current attitudes.

What is at issue is to recognize the operation in us which is us and which is not ours.

Dialectic is not a property of consciousness, rather consciousness is the property of dialectic. Dialectic has consciousness. -From Philosophy and Non-Philosophy Since Hegel

My possession of my own time is always deferred until the moment when I fully understand myself, but that moment can never arrive...in short, I am never at one with myself.

My own words take me by surprise and teach me what to think.

It is a question not of putting the perceptual faith in place of reflection, but on the contrary of taking into account the total situation, which involves reference from the one to the other. What is given is not a massive and opaque world, or a universe of adequate thought; it is a reflection which turns back over the density of the world in order to clarify it, but which, coming second, reflects back to it only its own light.

There is no contradiction between reflection as enveloping the past and the past as enveloping my present, because we are communicating through the depth-dimension. According to the depth-dimension, we are in the past and the past lives in us...We are moments of the open field...which is Sinngenesis, sense in genesis, emerging once and for all.

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.

Writers don't have the impression that they are creating or inventing because they are, in effect, in the process of deciphering the hieroglyphics of their landscape.

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.

Every act of reflection, every voluntary taking up of a position is established against the background and upon the proposition of a pre-personal life of consciousness.

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.

In our very present, we discover a layer of spiritual being, i.e., of historical being, delimiting a 'space of humanity,' and geometry is offered as belonging to it, I.e., geometry is offered as connected to a past in general, to men who as such are not known by us. But this nonknowledge is a knowledge. The essence of tradition lies in being not immediately graspable in a static essence. In front of our reflection, geometry and its tradition become a hollow; they open a dimension.

Blind logic, logic which creates on the way.

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

It is absolutely necessary to go back, to return to Freud.

Art stops human beings from working at their lives for a moment, and in that instant the entire truth of life is found.