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Signs Quotes

Browse 122 quotes about Signs.

Signs Quotes

“The relation of destiny with the cyclic process is implied in the figures of the legendary Tarot pack; the wealth of symbolic knowledge which is contained in each and every one of its cards is not to be despised, even if their symbolic significance is open to debate. For the illustrations of the Tarot afford clear examples of the signs, the dangers and the paths leading towards the infinite which Man may discover in the course of his existence.”

“God has a way of picking a “nobody” and turning their world upside down, in order to create a “somebody” that will remove the obstacles they encountered out of the pathway for others.”

“In this impossibility of reapprehending the world through images and of moving from information to a collective action and will, in this absence of sensibility and mobilization, it isn't apathy or general indifference that's at issue; it is quite simply that the umbilical cord of representation is severed. The screen reflects nothing. It is as though you are behind a two-way mirror: you see the world, but it doesn't see you, it doesn't look at you. Now, you only see things if they are looking at you. The screen screens out any dual relation (any possibility of 'response'). It is this failure of representation which, together with a failure of action, underlies the impossibility of developing an ethics of information, an ethics of images, an ethics of the Virtual and the networks. All attempts in that direction inevitably fail. All that remains is the mental diaspora of images and the extravagant performance of the medium. Susan Sontag tells a good story about this pre-eminence of the medium and of images: as she is sitting in front of the television watching the moon landing, the people she is watching with tell her they don't believe it at all. 'But what are you watching, then?' she asks. 'Oh, we're watching television!' Fantastic: they do not see the moon; they see only the screen showing the moon. They do not see the message; they see only the image. Ultimately, contrary to what Susan Sontag thinks, only intellectuals believe in the ascendancy of meaning; 'people' believe only in the ascendancy of signs. They long ago said goodbye to reality. They have gone over, body and soul, to the spectacular.”

“When truth and reality were made to take lie-detector tests, they themselves confessed to not believing in truth and reality. We are all agnostics. There were those who believed in God and those who did not. There are those who believe in reality and those who do not. And then there are the reality agnostics who, though not rejecting it in an absolute sense, reject belief in it: 'Reality (like God in the past) may perhaps exist, but I don't believe in it.' There is nothing contradictory or absurd in this. It is the enlightened refusal to let oneself be caught in the trap of a reality that is fetishized in its principle, a reality that is itself caught in the trap of the signs of reality. Is there such a thing as a naked, original reality, anterior to the signs in which it is made manifest? Who knows? The self-evidence of reality has a shadow of retrospective doubt hovering over it. However this may be, the agnostic is not concerned with this hinterworld or this original reality; he confines himself to reality as an unverifiable hypothesis, to signs as signs, behind which might also be hidden the absence of reality. (Their profusion in fact ends up voiding them of their credibility.)”

“The immateriality of signs is alien to me, as it is to a race of peasants with whom I share an obsessional morality, a sluggishness, a stupid, ancestral belief in the real. In reality, I am one of them. The simulation hypothesis is merely a maximalist position. The seduction hypothesis is merely a formal abstraction. It is the phantom of seduction which obsesses me—as for the rest, I have never managed anything other than to let myself be seduced. And this is quite alright: all the rest is merely destructive, moral passion. The seducing monk dreams of Manichean tension between the sign and the real as the most sublime form of morality. Only from time to time, the earth-shattering, hypothetical union of the two… Even then, the beauty of the violent resolution eludes him. Faith and fury first attack the impossibility of believing; they attack signs. Annihilating the world as sign, in order to make it an object of belief.”

“Many of you struggle to see the signs. Grief builds a wall that can keep us apart. Do you wonder why you can’t see me, sense me, feel me? It’s because when you weep and whine and brood and think yourself guilty when you are not, it pushes against my energy so I cannot reach you. When you have such an outpouring of emotion and sorrow, it’s like me trying to swim upstream through a waterfall of tears to get to you. But if you can try to relax and have faith in me, I can sail right over to you on the calm waters of your soul.”