Quotes About Perception

T)he philosopher is a perpetual beginner. This means that he accepts nothing as established from what men or scientists believe they know. This also means that philosophy itself is an ever-renewed experiment of its own beginning , that it consists entirely in describing this beginning, and finally, that radical reflection is conscious of its own dependence on an unreflected life that is its initial, constant, and final situation.

The world and I are within one another.

If this world is a poem, it is not because we see the meaning of it at first but on the strength of its chance occurrences and paradoxes.

The perceived world is the always-presupposed foundation of all rationality, all value, and all existence.

the real is coherent and probable because it is real, not real because it is coherent...

The number and richness of man's signifiers always surpasses the set of defined objects that could be termed signifieds. The symbolic function must always precede its object and does not encounter reality except when it precedes it into the imaginary…

The world is inseparable from the subject, but from a subject which is nothing but a project of the world, and the subject is inseparable from the world, but from a world which the subject itself projects.

There is nothing to be seen beyond our horizons, but other landscapes and still other horizons, and nothing inside the thing but other smaller things.

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.

Where are we to put the limit between the body and the world, since the world is flesh?

The thing can never be separated from someone who perceives it; nor can it ever actually be in itself because its articulations are the very ones of our existence, and because it is posited at the end of a gaze or at the conclusion of a sensory exploration that invests it with humanity. To taking up or the achievement by us of an alien intention or inversely the accomplishment beyond our perceptual powers and as a coupling of our body wit the things.

Philosophy is a will to confront human artifice with its outside, with Nature.

We situate ourselves in ourselves and in the things, in ourselves and in the other, and at the point where, by a sort of chiasm, we become the others and we become the world.

Nothing is more difficult than to know precisely what we see.

Expression is like a step taken in the fog--no one can say where, if anywhere, it will lead.

We know not through our intellect but through our Experience

We do not have the right to level out all experience into a single world.

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

the real is coherent and probable because it is real, and not real because it is coherent...

Rather than a mind and a body, man is a mind with a body, a being who can only get to the truth of things because its body is, as it were, embedded in those things.

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

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

We struggle with dream figures and our blows fall on living faces.