Arthur Hugh Clough Quotes

What is essential is whether it is perceived and not whether it exists. To exist and yet not to be perceived is the same as not exist.

We must always think about things, and we must think about things as they are, not as they are said to be.

That which is cannot be true.

Language is the house of the truth of Being.

I don't make things complicated, that's the way they get all by themselves.

Everything that you can imagine is going on is going on.

It's important you don't lose touch with reality because, well, reality's the only thing you've got, really.

It's a difficult business, finding out what's true about the world, the universe.

Being is the great explainer.

What I want people to consider is that no matter what it is we want to believe, and no matter what story it is we want to jam the world into, the truth is the truth.

There is nothing "ordinary" about reality.

I might as well doubt of my own being, as of the being of those things I actually see and feel.

Is perception equivalent to existence?

Because of its concrete content, sense-certainty immediately appears as the richest kind of knowledge, indeed a knowledge of infinite wealth for which no bounds can be found, either when we reach out into space and time in which it is dispersed, or when we take a bit of this wealth, and by division enter into it. Moreover, sense-certainty appears to be the truest knowledge ... but, in the event, this very certainty proves itself to be the most abstract and poorest truth. All that it says about what it knows is just that it is; and its truth contains nothing but the sheer being of the thing.

There is no seeing. Seeing is only being.

Things aren't different. Things are things.

Beyond positive and negative, what is Reality?

Well, sir, if things are real, they’re there all the time." "Are they?" said the Professor; and Peter did not quite know what to say.

For me, truth cracks open in the places where things do not cohere. That's how life is.

You want the truth, of course. You want me to put two and two together. But two and two doesn’t necessarily get you the truth. Two and two equals a voice outside the window. Two and two equals the wind. The living bird is not its labeled bones.

It is not a thing that you can imagine. It only is. After that, there can be no imagining.

A thing either is what it appears to be; or it is not, but yet appears to be; or it is, but does not appear to be; or it is not, and does not appear to be.

Let us affirm what seems to be the truth, that, whether one is or is not, one and the others in relation to themselves and one another, all of them, in every way, are and are not, and appear to be and appear not to be.

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.

I want to explain everything to him, show him that it’s really not as screwed up as it all sounds, but then I remember that it is.