Quotes About Awareness

Consciousness is not a good judge of what we are doing since we are involved in the struggle of history and in this we achieve more, less, or something else than we thought we were doing.

Inasmuch as there is figure, there is also inarticulate background, inasmuch as we have being (figure), we don't have it, and inasmuch as we don't have it (background), inasmuch as we let it be without thinking about it, that's when we have it.

Our perception ends in objects, and the object, once constituted, appears as the reason for all the experiences of it that we had or that we could have.

Philosophy is not the passage from a confused world to a universe of closed significations. On the contrary, philosophy begins with the awareness of a world which consumes and destroys our established significations but also renews and purifies them.

Through other eyes we are for ourselves fully visible.

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

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.

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

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.

What one too deliberately seeks, he does not find; and he who on the contrary has in his meditative life known how to tap its spontaneous source never lacks for ideas and values.

Originary perception is a non-thetic, pre-objective, and preconscious experience.

The 'unconscious'...is simply the pre-objective, oneiric background of all perception.

Reflection only fully grasps itself if it refers to the pre-reflective fund it presupposes, upon which it draws, and that constitutes for it, like an original past, a past that has never been present.

The possession of a representation or the exercise of a judgment is not coextensive with the life of consciousness. Rather, consciousness is a network of signification intentions which are sometimes clear to themselves and sometimes, on the contrary, lived rather than known.

Every sensation is already pregnant with a sense.

The unconscious is a perceiving consciousness... it operates as such through a logic of implication or promiscuity,

Memory is the irruption of other things in us.

Consciousness of something is always consciousness of a difference between terms that are not given positively.

Bodily functions take place in a psychic dimension. The digestive tube not only serves for digestion, but is also a manner of entering into relationship with the world.

If objects must never show me more than one of their sides, then this is because I myself am in a certain place from which I can see them, but which I cannot see.

There is passivity right there in activity...And there is activity right there in passivity.

In principle, the logician is only familiar with thetic consciousness.

Every perception is the perception of something solely by way of being at the same time the relative imperception of a horizon or background which it implies but does not thematize. Perceptual consciousness is therefore indirect or even inverted in relation to an ideal of adequation which it presumes but never encounters directly.