Quotes About Perception

In this exchange between the subject of sensation and the sensible, it cannot be said that one acts while the other suffers the action, nor that one gives sense to the other...The sensible gives back to me what I had lent to it, but I received it from the sensible in the first place.

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

Surpassing surpasses only through recurrence.

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.

In the horizon, there is no subject and object. We are there like the others; we are, like the others, drawn out of this horizonal being, divergences or variants in relation to it.

Signification is always the divergence: what the other says appears to me to be full of meaning because his lacunae are never where mine are. Perspective multiplicity.

We all secretly venerate the ideal of a language which in the last analysis would deliver us from language by delivering us to things.

My organism--as a pre-personal adhesion to the general form of the world, as an anonymous and general existence--plays the role of an innate complex beneath the level of my personal life. My organism is not like some inert thing, it itself sketches out the movement of existence.

Institution...is neither perceived nor thought as a concept. It is the wherewithal on which I count at eh moment, which is seen nowhere and is assumed by everything that is visible for a human beimg, it is what is at issue each moment and which has no name and no identity in our theories of consciousness.

The Umwelt is less and less oriented toward a goal and more and more toward the interpretation of symbols.

What the animal shows is not the manifestation of a finality, but rather of an existential value of manifestation, of presentation. What the animal shows is not utility; rather, its appearance manifests something that resembles our oneiric life.

I do not perceive simply "things" but also use-objects: an article of clothing, for example...Nerve functioning distributes not only spatial and chromatic values but also symbolic values.

The living physiology of the nervous system can only be understood by starting from phenomenal givens.

Trace: presence of an absent: experience of an absence.

A determinate emptiness: a lack, a privation, a dimension (new type of intellectual existence).

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

We should be sensitive to the thread of silence from which the tissue of speech is woven.

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 person himself must be understood as institution, not as consciousness of...

The structure 'world,' with its double movement of sedimentation and spontaneity, is at the center of consciousness.

Everything is offered up to a truth that is emergent and possessed by anyone. The delicate point is that this truth should be realized neither beyond the world, as it is by those who go to Mass, nor on this side of it, as it is for the Marxists.

This dialogue between the subject and the object, where the subject takes the sense scattered across the object and the object gathers together the subjec's intentions, namely, physiognomic perception, arranges a world around the subject that speaks to him on the topic of himself and places his own thoughts in the world.

The question is to know whether, as Sartre says, there are only humans and things or whether there is also the interworld, which we call history, symbolism, truth-to-be-made.