Shona

“Perhaps "reality" does not belong definitively to any particular perception, that in this sense it lies always further on; but this does not authorize me to break or to ignore the bond that joins them one after the
other to the real, a bond that cannot be broken with the one without first having been established with the following...Each perception is mutable and only probable—it is, if one likes, only an opinion; but what
is not opinion, what each perception, even if false, verifies, is the belongingness of each experience to the same world, their equal power to manifest it, as possibilities of the same world...And this is why the very fragility of a perception, attested by its breakup and by the substitution of another perception, far from authorizing us to efface the index of "reality" from them all, obliges us to concede it to all of them, to recognize all of them to be variants of the same world, and finally to consider them not as all false but as "all true," not as repeated failures in the determination of the world but as progressive approximations...It is the prepossession of a
totality which is there before one knows how and why, whose realizations are never what we would have imagined them to be, and which nonetheless fulfills a secret expectation within us, since we believe in it tirelessly.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible

“The danger of our time is that Christianity won; its form of morality (slave: weakness, humility, compassion; pride is a vice) was so successful that people believe it even without believing in its fundamental anchor: God. Atheism was the final victory of Christianity, because no longer did Christianity need God for itself to prevail as a moral ideology.”
― Peter Sjöstedt-H

“The enigma derives from the fact that my body simultaneously sees and is seen. That which looks at all things can also look at itself and recognize in what it sees the 'other side' of its power of looking. It sees itself seeing; it touches itself touching; it is visible and sensitive for itself. It is a self, not a transparency, like thought, which never thinks anything except by assimilating it, constituting it, transforming it into thought-- but a self by confusion, narcissism, inherence of the seer in the seen, the toucher in the touched, the feeler in the felt -- a self, then, that is caught up in things, having a front and a back, a past and a future.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible

“The bandaging hurt. Everything that has happened to me since has hurt. But sometimes, when I find the key and climb fully down into myself, where the images of destiny slumber in their dark mirrror, I need only bend down over the black mirror and I see my own image, which now looks exactly like Him, Him, my friend and my guide.”
― Hermann Hesse, Demian