Phenomenology Quotes

“The body is our general medium for having a world.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception

“The door handle is the handshake of the building.”
― Juhani Pallasmaa, The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Senses

“A word is a bud attempting to become a twig. How can one not dream while writing? It is the pen which dreams. The blank page gives the right to dream.”
― Gaston Bachelard

“The process of 'reinterpreting and adjusting' our understanding of truth reflects the ongoing, dynamic nature of , phenomenological inquiry, where truth is never fully grasped but always approached through lived experience. .("Behind the frosted glass”)”
― Erik Pevernagie

“Contrary to what phenomenology—which is always phenomenology of perception—has tried to make us believe, contrary to what our desire cannot fail to be tempted into believing, the thing itself always escapes.”
― Jacques Derrida

“The perception of other people and the intersubjective world is problematic only for adults. The child lives in a world which he unhesitatingly believes accessible to all around him. He has no awares of himself or of others as private subjectives, nor does he suspect that all of us, himself included, are limited to one certain point of view of the world. That is why he subjects neither his thoughts, in which he believes as they present themselves, to any sort of criticism. He has no knowledge of points of view. For him men are empty heads turned towards one single, self-evident world where everything takes place, even dreams, which are, he thinks, in his room, and even thinking, since it is not distinct from words.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception

“We must listen to poets.”
― Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space

“First, anyone who seriously intends to become a philosopher
must "once in his life" withdraw into himself and attempt,
within himself, to overthrow and build anew all the sciences
that, up to then, he has been accepting. Philosophy wisdom
(sagesse) is the philosophizer's quite personal affair. It must
arise as His wisdom, as his self-acquired knowledge tending
toward universality, a knowledge for which he can answer from
the beginning, and at each step, by virtue of his own absolute
insights.”
― Edmund Husserl, Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology

“To begin with, we put the proposition: pure phenomenology is the science of pure consciousness.”
― Edmund Husserl

“The phenomenological world is not the bringing to explicit expression of a pre-existing being, but the laying down of being. Philosophy is not the reflection of a pre-existing truth, but, like art, the act of bringing truth into being.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception

“Take no one’s word for anything, including mine - but trust your experience.”
― James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time

“There are three basic problems: how a mind can know the world of nature, how it is possible for one mind to know another, and how it is possible to know the contents of our own minds without resort to observation or evidence. It is a mistake, I shall urge, to suppose that these questions can be collapsed into two, or taken into isolation.”
― Donald Davidson

“His face was neither handsome nor anything else. It just was.”
― Tarjei Vesaas, The Birds

“Bodies are real entities. Surfaces and lines are but fictitious entities. A surface without depth, a line without thickness, was never seen by any man; no; nor can any conception be seriously formed of its existence.”
― Jeremy Bentham, The Panopticon Writings: (Wo Es War)

“My life will have been a succession of lives, as if I have had several lives, a multiplicity of stories and roles. I have not ceased to have changes of life.”
― Bernard Stiegler, Acting Out

“Insofar as he makes use of his healthy senses, man himself is the best and most exact scientific instrument possible. The greatest misfortune of modern physics is that its experiments have been set apart from man, as it were, physics refuses to recognize nature in anything not shown by artificial instruments, and even uses this as a measure of its accomplishments.”
― Goethe

“This is what is meant by the phenomenology of the science-making process: Self-observation always leads us to an existential point about the metaphysics of experience, and it is almost always a transforming moment. (p. 286)”
― Eugene Taylor, Shadow Culture: Psychology and Spirituality in America

“The number two, he thought, was an ominous number. Two is a reflection or duplication of one, the most perfect of the natural numbers. Two is all echo and counterpoise; two is the beginning of multiplicity, the way the universal oneness differentiates itself and breaks apart into strings and quarks and photons, all the separate and component pieces of life. Two is a symbol of becoming as opposed to pure being...”
― David Zindell, The Wild

“Zu den Sachen selbst!”
― Edmund Husserl

“In the case where the self is merely represented and ideally presented (vorgestellt), there it is not actual: where it is by proxy, it is not.”
― Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind

“Ontically, of course, Dasein is not only close to us―even that which is closest: we *are* it, each of us, we ourselves. In spite of this, or rather for just this reason, it is ontologically that which is farthest. To be sure, its ownmost Being is such that it has an understanding of that Being, and already maintains itself in each case as if its Being has been interpreted in some manner. But we are certainly not saying that when Dasein's own Being is thus interpreted pre-ontologically in the way which lies closest, this interpretation can be taken over as an appropriate clue, as if this way of understanding Being is what must emerge when one's ownmost state of Being is considered as an ontological theme. The kind of Being which belongs to Dasein is rather such that, in understanding its own Being, it has a tendency to do so in terms of that entity towards which it comports itself proximally and in a way which is essentially constant―in terms of the 'world'. In Dasein itself, and therefore in its own understanding of Being, the way the world is understood is, as we shall show, reflected back ontologically upon the way in which Dasein itself gets interpreted.

Thus because Dasein is ontico-ontologically prior, its own specific state of Being (if we understand this in the sense of Dasein's 'categorial structure') remains concealed from it. Dasein is ontically 'closest' to itself and ontologically farthest; but pre-ontologically it is surely not a stranger."

―from_Being and Time_. Translated by John Macquarrie & Edward Robinson, pp. 36-37”
― Martin Heidegger

“The relation to the other is not epistemological, but ethical, and the whole attempt to accomodate or account for the other within the confines of my experience already constitutes a breach of this fundamental ethical relation. The other is precisely that which cannot be the object of my experience in the sense of being completely manifest within it, and so cannot be construed as a phenomenon at all.”
― David R. Cerbone

“The Buddha asks us to see things as they really are. He does not ask us to cling to optimistic views of eternity or pessimistic views of annihilation but simply to examine our experience.”
― Red Pine, The Heart Sutra

“[...] and what is loving other than being conscious of an object as lovable?”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty

“English: "The manner of clouding our past interiority is similar to the manner of clouding the interiority of others."

Česky: „Způsob zamlžení našeho minulého nitra se podobá způsobu zamlžení nitra ostatních.”
― Sebastián Wortys

“English: "The boundaries between words are not identical to the boundaries of phenomena in the world."

Česky: „Hranice mezi slovy nejsou totožné s hranicemi jevů ve světě.”
― Sebastián Wortys

“Without reduction and categorization we simply could not survive. And so, when considered in the strictest sense, the point is not to live without categories, rather to first liquify established and malignant categories on order to then to helpful sense categories and interpretations that will open up the cognitive space of putting for interpretation and action.”
― Jürgen Kriz, Self-Actualization

“That part of our conscious experience representable by physical symbols ought not to claim to be the whole. As a conscious being you are not one of my symbols; your domain is not circumscribed by my spatial measurements. If, like Hamlet, you count yourself king of an infinite space, I do not challenge your sovereignty. I only invite attention to certain disquieting rumours which have arisen as to the state of Your Majesty's nutshell.”
― Arthur Stanley Eddington, The Expanding Universe: Astronomy's 'Great Debate', 1900–1931

“[M]ost Husserl scholars ... seem to be blind to the future and have eyes only for the present. For they are so interested in the present in order to make phenomenology ... compatible with the most fashionable trends of contemporary philosophy ... that they do not realize that - in so doing - nothing will be left of phenomenology in the future.

Indeed, Husserl’s phenomenology has already been stripped of its highest aspirations
(viz., that of developing a full-fledged theory of reason able to provide a new foundation for metaphysics and, linked to the latter, reforming humanity); it has already been stripped or freed of its most important methodological tools (e.g., the so-called transcendental reduction); more recently, even Heidegger’s phenomenology
has been purged of its language (e.g., by translating Dasein as “mind”). [...]

The desire to make phenomenology, specially Husserl’s thought, attractive to the present will merely relegate it to the past, for phenomenology seems to be suitable for the present only on condition that it is no longer phenomenology itself.”
― Daniele De Santis, Husserl and the A Priori: Phenomenology and Rationality

“When it is really natural science that speaks, we listen willingly and as disciples. But the language of the natural scientists is not always that of natural science itself, and is assuredly not so when they speak of "natural philosophy" and the "theory of knowledge of natural science.”
― Edmund Husserl, Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology