Stan Brakhage Quotes

I think, therefore I am.

I am all that there is of the most real.

I stick my finger into existence.. it smells of nothing. Where am I? Who am I? What is this thing called the world? What does this word mean?

Consciousness is a being the nature of which is to be conscious of the nothingness of its being.

There is no frontier between being and appearing.

The world is... the natural setting of, and field for, all my thoughts and all my explicit perceptions. Truth does not inhabit only the inner man, or more accurately, there is no inner man, man is in the world, and only in the world does he know himself.

I secretly think reality exists so we can speculate about it.

The world is real. Consciousness is the illusion.

I dream, therefore I exist.

Meaning and reality were not hidden somewhere behind things, they were in them, in all of them.

We are assuming that we exist, that there is reality, and that the matter of which we are made is real.

The two basic topics which fascinate me are 'What is reality?' and 'What constitutes the authentic human being?'

What difference, if you are mistaken? For if I am mistaken, I am. For he who is not, assuredly cannot be mistaken; and therefore I am, if I am mistaken. Therefore because I am if I am mistaken, how am I mistaken that I am, when it is sure that I am, if I am mistaken.

I know only that I was born and exist, and it seems to me that I have been carried along. I exist on the foundation of something I do not know. In spite of all uncertainties, I feel a solidity underlying all existence and a continuity in my mode of being.

We are and we know we are and we love to be it and know it.

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.

Being is only Being for Dasein.

No one thought up being. He who thinks he has, step forward.

To be is to be perceived

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.

Being is. Being is in-itself. Being is what it is.

The fact that one can lose one's sense of self in an ocean of tranquility does not mean that one's consciousness is immaterial or that it presided over the birth of the universe.

The only way to give finality to the world is to give it consciousness.

The very act of questioning whether you exist proves you do, because you must be there for the doubt to be entertained in the first place.

Language is the house of the truth of Being.