Quotes About Perception

The eye accomplishes the prodigious work of opening the soul to what is not soul – the joyous realm of things and their god, the sun.

When I am listening, it is not necessary that I have an auditory perception of the articulated sounds but that the conversation pronounces itself within me. It summons me and grips me; it envelops and inhabits me to the point that I cannot tell what comes from me and what from it. Whether speaking or listening, I project myself into the other person, I introduce him into my own self.

Meaning is like spots of light surrounded by rugged clouds of night, glowing islands.

The form is a visible or sonorous configuration (or even a configuration which is prior to the distinction of the senses) in which the sensory value of each element is determined by its function in the whole and varies with it...This same notion of form will permit us to describe the mode of existence of the primitive objects of perception. They are lived as realities, we have said, rather than known as true objects.

The universe is defined not by what one sees, what one says, but precisely by what one does not see, precisely what one does not say: by the difference between the one and the other.

The child and adult reflect each other like two mirrors endlessly placed face to face. The child that we believe exists is the reflection we desire. We are all indissolubly tied to the fact that the other is facing us the way we are facing him.

Signs do not simply evoke other signs for us and so on without end, and language is not like a prison we are locked into or a guide we must blindly follow; for what these linguistic gestures mean and gain us such complete access to that we seem to have no further need of them to refer to it finally appears at the intersection of all of them.

Prior to stimuli and sensory contents, we must recognize a kind of inner diaphragm which determines, infinitely more than they do, what our reflexes and perceptions will be able to aim at in the world, the area of our possible operations, the scope of our life.

We would not know even what the false is, if there were not times when we had distinguished it from the true...If we are to be able to speak of falsity, we do have to have experiences of truth.

This unconscious is to be sought not at the bottom of ourselves, behind the back of our 'consciousness,' but in front of us, as articulations in our field. It is 'unconscious' by not being object but by being that through which objects are possible, it is the constellation from which our future may be read.

The manner in which the child assumes his relations with the family constellation can be read in the type of perception and knowledge that he accomplishes.

In the last analysis each one of us knows for his own part that the world as it is, is unacceptable.

The perceived world endures only through the reflections, shadows, levels, and horizons between things (which are not things and are not nothimg, but on the contrary mark out by themselves the fields of possible variation in the same thing and the same world)

We must stop thinking in terms of causality. Or again we must admit that we are dealing with a webbed causality and not a linear causality.

The body is to be compared, not to a physical object, but rather to a work of art.

If it is true that I am conscious of my body through the world and if my body is the unperceived term at the center of the world toward which every object turns its face, then it is true for the same reason that my body is the pivot of of the world.

The essences by necessity will not be the "answer" philosophy calls for, any more than are the facts. The "answer" is higher than the "facts," lower than the "essences," in the wild Being where they were, and—behind or beneath the cleavages of our acquired culture—continue to be, undivided.

The unconscious is not a second consciousness, but a nonthematized lived experience.

The organism is an edifice of compensated instabilities (cf. walk, lose one's balance, catch oneself). Sich bewegen= to organize the instability oneself, and thereby dominate it (the Sich defined without 'consciousness').

I live in the facial expressions of the other, as I feel him living in mine.

The photograph keeps open the instants which the onrush of time closes up forthwith; it destroys the overtaking, the overlapping, the metamorphosis of time.

The invisible is a hollow in the visible, a fold in passivity, not pure production.

The The distinction between the real and the oneiric cannot be identical with the simple distinction between consciousness filled by meaning and consciousness given up to its own void. The two modalities impinge upon one another. Our waking relations with objects and others especially have an oneiric character as a matter of principle: others are present to us in the way that dreams are, the way myths are, and this is enough to question the cleavage between the real and the imaginary.

The perceptual synthesis is a temporal synthesis. Subjectivity, at the level of perception, is nothing other than temporality...In every moment of focusing, my body ties a present, a past, and a future together. It secretes time, or rather it becomes that place in nature where for the first time events, rather than pushing each other into being, project a double horizon of the past and future around the present and acquire a historical orientation.