Quotes About Perception

This swarming of words behind words, thoughts behind thoughts--this universal substitution is also a kind of stability.

The imaginary is lodged in the world.

But the spectacle perceived does not partake of pure being. Taken exactly as I see it, it is a moment of my individual history, and since sensation is a reconstitution, it pre-supposes in me sediments left behind by some previous constitution, so that I am, as a sentient subject, a repository stocked with natural powers at which I am the first to be filled with wonder.

If I wanted to express perceptual experience with precision, I would have to say that one perceives in me, and not that I perceive. Every sensation includes a seed of dream or depersonalization, as we experience through this sort of stupor into which it puts us when we truly live at the level of sensation.

Philosophy is not a hospital. If people are vertiginous and want to take medication against it, I don't stop them, but I say: this is medication.

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

Language is everything, since it is the voice of no one, since it is the very voice of things, the waves and the forests.

To see the object is to plunge into it.

There are several ways for a body to be a body, and several ways for consciousness to be consciousness.

If I wanted to render precisely the perceptual experience, I ought to say that 'one' perceives in me, and not that I perceive.

It would then be found that the words, vowels, and phonemes are so many ways of 'singing' the world. The initial form of language, therefore, would have been a kind of song.

Each one of us knows for his own part that the world as it is, is unacceptable.

If at the center and so to speak the kernel of Being there is an infinite infinite, every partial being directly or indirectly presupposes it, and is in return really or eminently contained in it. All the relationships we can have to Being must be simultaneously founded upon it.

To think is not having but not having.

I rediscover the world - which I had distinguished from myself as a sum of things or of processes tied together through causal relations - 'in myself' as the permanent horizon of all of my thoughts and as a dimension in relation to which I never cease situating myself.

W)e must - precisely in order to see the world and to grasp it as a paradox - rupture our familiarity with it, and this rupture can teach us nothing except the unmotivated springing forth of the world.

Some think that the painting does not so much express the meaning as the meaning impregnates the painting.

The origin of language is mythic; that is, there is always a language before language, which is perception.

To constitute...is nearly the opposite of to institute: the instituted makes sense without me, the constituted makes sense only for me and for the 'me' of this instant...The instituted straddles its future, has its future its temporality, the constituted depends entirely on the 'me' who constitutes (the body, the clock).

Visible being is natural...But language, art, history gravitate around the invisible (ideality).

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.

How could it limit its investigation to one sector of reality? How could it help being pluralistic? How could it help finding the same truth everywhere?

I am, as a sensing subject, full of natural powers of which I am the first to be filled with wonder. Thus I am not, to recall Hegel's phrase, a 'hole in being,' but rather a hollow, or a fold that was made and that can be unmade.