Source: Self-Consciousness : Memoirs (1989), Ch. 6
“no reality is mine, no reality belongs to me (to us), we all live somewhere else, beyond where we are, we are all a reality different from the word I or the word we;
our most intimate reality lies outside ourselves and is not ours, and it is not one but many, plural and transitory, we are this plurality that is continually dissolving, the self is perhaps real, but the self is not I or you or he, the self is neither mine nor yours,
it is a state, a blink of the eye, it is the perception of a sensation that is vanishing, but who or what perceives, who senses?
are the eyes that look at what I write the same eyes that I say are looking at what I write?
we come and go between the word that dies away as it is uttered and the sensation that vanishes in perception—although we do not know who it is that utters the word nor who it is that perceives, although we do know that the self that perceives something that is vanishing also vanishes in this perception: it is only the perception of that self s own extinction,
we come and go: the reality beyond names is not habitable and the reality of names is a perpetual falling to pieces, there is nothing solid in the universe, in the entire dictionary there is not a single word on which to rest our heads, everything is a continual coming and going from things to names to things,
no, I say that I perpetually come and go but I haven’t moved, as the tree has not moved since I began to write,
inexact expressions once again: I began, I write, who is writing what I am reading?, the question is reversible: what am I reading when I write: who is writing what I am reading?”
Source: The Monkey Grammarian (1974), Ch. 9
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Octavio Paz 71
Mexican writer laureated with the 1990 Nobel Prize for Lite… 1914–1998Related quotes
On wanting to legitimize her relationship (as quoted in “Gay rights icon Edie Windsor’s sheer force carries ‘A Wild and Precious Life’” https://www.tampabay.com/arts-entertainment/arts/books/2019/10/08/gay-rights-icon-edie-windsors-sheer-force-carries-a-wild-and-precious-life/) (Tampa Bay; 2019 Oct 8)
Quote of Naum Gabo, 1950; as cited in: Eidos: a journal of painting, sculpture and design. Nr.1, p. 31
1936 - 1977
Source: Adventures In Consciousness: An Introduction to Aspect Psychology (1975), pp.118-119
The Believer interview (2013)
The Sun My Heart (1996)
Context: Self, person, living being, and life span are four notions that prevent us from seeing reality.
Life is one. We do not need to slice it into pieces and call this or that piece a "self." What we call a self is made only of non-self elements. When we look at a flower, for example, we may think that it is different from "non-flower" things. But when we look more deeply, we see that everything in the cosmos is in that flower. Without all of the non-flower elements — sunshine, clouds, earth, minerals, heat, rivers, and consciousness — a flower cannot be. That is why the Buddha teaches that the self does not exist. We have to discard all distinctions between self and non-self.
Source: Truth and Method (1960), p. 289
Variant translation: In truth history does not belong to us but rather we to history. … The focus of subjectivity is a distorted mirror. Individual self-reflection is merely a flickering in the closed circuit of historical life. That is why the prejudices of an individual are —much more than that individual's judgments — the historical reality of his being.
As quoted in Tom Neton, "Hermeneutical Truth and the Structure of Human Experience: Gadamer's Critique of Dilthey" in The Specter of Relativism: Truth, Dialogue, and Phronesis in Philosophical Hermeneutics (1995) edited by Lawrence Schmidt.