Quotes About Sense

You couldn't be a little bit human in the same way you couldn't be a little bit in love. It was all or nothing. A drop was an ocean. And maybe being human wasn't even down to DNA in the end. Maybe it was about the ability to love, when you knew love was irrational. Yeah, maybe being human was to make no sense.

And hope was often irrational. It made no sense. If it had made sense, it would have been called, well, sense. The other thing about hope was that it took effort, and I had never been used to effort.

But once you sense that vastness, once something reveals it, hope emerges, whether you want it to or not, and it clings to you as stubbornly as lichen clings to rock.

Just as we need pauses between notes for music to sound good, and just as we need punctuation in a sentence for it to be coherent, we should see rest and reflection and passivity—and even sitting on the sofa—as an intrinsic and essential part of life that is needed for the whole to make sense.

A photograph is basically a two-dimensional nonmoving holograph catering only to the sense of sight.

Taking it in its wider and generic application, I understand faith to be the supplement of sense or, to change the phrase, all knowledge which comes not to us through our senses we gain by faith in others.

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).

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.

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.

I do not perceive any more than I speak--Perception has me as has language--And as it is necessary that all the same I be there in order to speak, I must be there in order to perceive--But in what sense? As one--What is it that, from my side, comes to animate the perceived world and language?

The Wesen is sense of radiation, connected to materials, ingraspable outside of the fact or outside of existence. It is the way in which a whole is produced and reproduced, inseparable from this production. (verbal) Wesen

How to rediscover the emerging sense of philosophy? By expanding our thoughts, our lived situation of the philosopher through those of the ancients, and those of the ancients by ours. This reciprocal contestation unveils the common field of which philosophies are only sections.

But this 'structural' or concrete a priori is neither a Kantian category nor even a Hegelian idea; it is the universal ground of sense=the sense funally, far fro, being an idea, is a ground. Philosophy seeks in the archeology of the ground, in the depth and not in the height (the ideas)...the ground in the literal sense: the earth.

If to do philosophy is to discover the primary sense of being, then one does not philosophize in quitting the human situation; it is necessary rather to plunge into it. The absolute knowledge of the philosopher is perception.

Institution of a work, like the institution of a love, intends a sense as open sense, which develops by means of proliferation, by curves, decentering and recenterimg, zigzag, ambiguous passage, with a sort of identity between the whole and the parts, the beginning and end. A sort of existential eternity by means of self-interpretation.

It would be a mistake to believe that psychoanalysis, even for Freud, excludes the description of psychological motives and is opposed to the phenomenological method. Psychoanalysis has, on the contrary (and unwittingly), contributed to developing the phenomenological method by claiming, as Freud puts it, that every human act 'has a sense,' and by seeking everywhere to understand the event rather than to tie it to mechanical conditions.

Concepts for a philosopher are only nets for catching sense.

History does not provide me with its sense ready-made. I have to remake it, but my interactions with history form me, they give way to a labor at the end of which I cannot say that I donate sense, for my criteria are put in question there...Here to receive is to give, in effect, but to give is to receive. Such is the sense of the notion of field and of institution: they give what they do not have and what we receive from them, we bring to them.

By institution we were intending here those events in an experience which endow the experience with durable dimensions, in relation to which a whole series of other experiences will make sense, will form a thinkable sequence or history--or again the events which deposit a sense in me, not just as something surviving or as a residue, but as the call to follow, the demand of a future.

By returning to phenomena, we find, as a fundamental layer, a whole already pregnant with an irreducible sense.

Love in an animal sense is an illness, but a necessity which one has to overcome.

Either marriage is a destiny, I believe, or there is no sense in it at all, it's a piece of humbug.

The willingness to abandon is usually the more trustworthy response. If you don't sense or can't cultivate this willingness in yourself, speculation of any kind could be difficult for you, and speculation on margin could be disastrous

Proudhon, e.g., thinks that with the sentence "Property is theft" he has at once put a brand on property. In the sense of the priestly, theft is always a crime, or at least a misdeed