Top 100 Maurice Merleau Ponty Quotes
#1. Evolution, life, physis, appear here as enveloping with regard to 'consciousness' of human knowledge.
Maurice Merleau Ponty
#2. If at the center and so to speak the kernel of Being there is an infinite infinite, every partial being directly or indirectly presupposes it, and is in return really or eminently contained in it. All the relationships we can have to Being must be simultaneously founded upon it.
Maurice Merleau Ponty
#3. Thinking which displaces, or otherwise defines, the sacred has been called atheistic, and that philosophy which does not place it here or there, like a thing, but at the joining of things and words, will always be exposed to this reproach without ever being touched by it.
Maurice Merleau Ponty
#5. There is not identity, nor non-identity, or non-coincidence, there is inside and outside turning about one another.
Maurice Merleau Ponty
#7. The world is inseparable from the subject, but from a subject which is nothing but a project of the world, and the subject is inseparable from the world, but from a world which the subject itself projects.
Maurice Merleau Ponty
#8. Montaigne [puts] not self-satisfied understanding but a consciousness astonished at itself at the core of human existence.
Maurice Merleau Ponty
#9. If myths, dreams and illusion are to be possible, the apparent and the real must remain ambiguous in the subject as in the object.
Maurice Merleau Ponty
#10. Visible and mobile, my body is a thing among things; it's caught in the fabric of the world, and its cohesion is that of a thing. But, because it moves itself and sees, it holds things in a circle around itself.
Maurice Merleau Ponty
#11. We are human precisely insofar as we always intend a singularity across the thickness of our lives, insofar as we are grouped around this unique interior where there is no one, which is latent, veiled, and escapes from us always leaving behind in our hands truth which are like traces of its absence.
Maurice Merleau Ponty
#12. Each one of us knows for his own part that the world as it is, is unacceptable.
Maurice Merleau Ponty
#13. A regime which is nominally liberal can be oppressive in reality. A regime which acknowledges its violence might have more genuine humanity.
Maurice Merleau Ponty
#15. Our body is not in space like things; it inhabits or haunts space. It applies itself to space like a hand to an instrument. And when we wish to move about, we do not move the body as we move an object.
Maurice Merleau Ponty
#16. Thought without language, says Lavelle, would not be a purer thought; it would be no more than the intention to think. And his last book offers a theory of expressiveness which makes of expression not a faithful image of an already realized interior being, but the very means by which it is realized.
Maurice Merleau Ponty
#18. The body is to be compared, not to a physical object, but rather to a work of art.
Maurice Merleau Ponty
#19. Personal life, expression, knowledge, and history advance obliquely, and not directly, toward ends or toward concepts. That which is sought too deliberately is not obtained.
Maurice Merleau Ponty
#20. Perhaps the truth is simply that one would need many lives to enter each realm of experience with the total abandon it demands.
Maurice Merleau Ponty
#21. I discover vision, not as a "thinking about seeing," to use Descartes expression, but as a gaze at grips with a visible world, and that is why for me there can be another's gaze.
Maurice Merleau Ponty
#22. 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.
Maurice Merleau Ponty
#23. What resists phenomenology within us--natural being, the 'barbarian' source Schelling spoke of--cannot remain outside phenomenology. The philosopher must bear his shadow, which is not simply the factual absence of future light.
Maurice Merleau Ponty
#24. It is impossible to be an anti-Communist and it is not possible to be a Communist.
Maurice Merleau Ponty
#26. Our own body is in the world as the heart is in the organism: it keeps the visible spectacle constantly alive, it breathes life into it and sustains it inwardly, and with it forms a system.
Maurice Merleau Ponty
#27. The world and Being hold together only in movement; it is only in this way that all things can be together. Philosophy is a reminding of this being.
Maurice Merleau Ponty
#29. We must therefore rediscover, after the natural world, the social world, not as an object or sum of objects, but as a permanent field or dimension of existence.
Maurice Merleau Ponty
#30. Machiavelli is the complete contrary of a machiavellian, since he describes the tricks of power and gives the whole show away. The seducer and the politician, who live in the dialectic and have a feeling and instinct for it, try their best to keep it hidden.
Maurice Merleau Ponty
#33. The generality of time, of a family of times, is derived from the fact that all these times are enveloped in a process of nature.
Maurice Merleau Ponty
#34. The real is coherent and probable because it is real, not real because it is coherent ...
Maurice Merleau Ponty
#38. To understand is to experience harmony between what we aim at and what is given, between the intention and the performance - and the body is our anchorage in the world.
Maurice Merleau Ponty
#39. Where are we to put the limit between the body and the world, since the world is flesh?
Maurice Merleau Ponty
#41. How do we know that it refers to the past? That is the real problem of memory.
Maurice Merleau Ponty
#42. The world and reason are not problems; and though we might call them mysterious, this mystery is essential to them, there can be no question of dissolving it through some 'solution,' it is beneath the level of solutions.
Maurice Merleau Ponty
#43. We carry in our incarnate being the alphabet & the grammar of life, but this does not presuppose an achieved meaning either in us or in it.
Maurice Merleau Ponty
#44. It is a great good fortune, as Stendhal said, for one to have his passion as a profession.
Maurice Merleau Ponty
#45. We will arrive at the universal not by abandoning our particularity but by turning it into a way of reaching others, by virtue of that mysterious affinity which makes situations mutually understandable.
Maurice Merleau Ponty
#48. Man is hidden, well hidden, & this time we must make no mistake about it: this does not mean that he is there beneath a mask, ready to appear ... the situation is more serious: there are no faces underneath the masks, historical man has never been human, & yet no man is alone.
Maurice Merleau Ponty
#49. The unfinished nature of phenomenology and the inchoate style in which it proceeds are not the signs of failure; they were inevitable because phenomenology's task was to reveal the mystery of the world and the mystery of reason.
Maurice Merleau Ponty
#50. If every statement is incomplete and every expression is situated upon a silent tacit comprehension, then it must be that things are said and are thought by a Speech and by a Thought which we do not have but which has us.
Maurice Merleau Ponty
#52. Nothing determines me from outside, not because nothing acts upon me, but, on the contrary, because I am from the start outside myself and open to the world.
Maurice Merleau Ponty
#53. It would then be found that the words, vowels, and phonemes are so many ways of 'singing' the world. The initial form of language, therefore, would have been a kind of song.
Maurice Merleau Ponty
#54. 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.
Maurice Merleau Ponty
#55. What do I bring to the problem of the same and the other? This: that the same be the other than the other, and identity difference of difference.
Maurice Merleau Ponty
#56. Socrates reminds us that it is not the same thing, but almost the opposite, to understand religion and to accept it.
Maurice Merleau Ponty
#59. History flows neither from the past nor to the future alone: it reverses its course and, when you get right down to it, flows from all the presents.
Maurice Merleau Ponty
#60. Everything written has a political bearing, even in the case of a study on bees.
Maurice Merleau Ponty
#61. If this world is a poem, it is not because we see the meaning of it at first but on the strength of its chance occurrences and paradoxes.
Maurice Merleau Ponty
#62. Violence is the common origin of all regimes. Life, discussion, and political choice occur only against a background of violence.
Maurice Merleau Ponty
#63. I will never know how you see red and you will never know how I see it. But this separation of consciousness is recognized only after a failure of communication, and our first movement is to believe in an undivided being between us.
Maurice Merleau Ponty
#65. The perceived world is the always-presupposed foundation of all rationality, all value, and all existence.
Maurice Merleau Ponty
#66. Expression is like a step taken in the fog
no one can say where, if anywhere, it will lead.
Maurice Merleau Ponty
#70. Memory deforms reality, which nevertheless is formed as reality only in memory
Maurice Merleau Ponty
#71. Nothingness is like the point of the stroboscopic spiral, which is who knows where, which is 'nobody.
Maurice Merleau Ponty
#72. I am not in front of my body, I am in it or rather I am it ... If we can still speak of interpretation in relation to the perception of one's own body, we shall have to say that it interprets itself.
Maurice Merleau Ponty
#73. Philosophy is a will to confront human artifice with its outside, with Nature.
Maurice Merleau Ponty
#74. Stiftung is not enveloping thought, but open thought, not the intended and Vorhabe of an actual center, but an 'off-center' which will be rectified, not the positing of an end, but the positing of a style, not a frontal grasp but a lateral divergence, algae brought back from the depths.
Maurice Merleau Ponty
#75. There is no more individuated being in the system. We only ever have to deal with families of trajectories.
Maurice Merleau Ponty
#76. We speak of 'inspiration,' and the word should be taken literally. There really is inspiration and expiration of Being.
Maurice Merleau Ponty
#77. Moonlight and sunlight in our memory are presented before all else, not as sensory contents, but as a certain type of symbiosis, a certain manner that the outside has of invading us, a certain manner that we have of receiving it.
Maurice Merleau Ponty
#78. Everyone is alone and yet nobody can do without other people, not just because they are useful ... but also when it comes to happiness.
Maurice Merleau Ponty
#79. [The sensate body possesses] an art of interrogating the sensible according to its own wishes, an inspired exegesis
Maurice Merleau Ponty
#80. We do not have a choice between purity and violence but between different kinds of violence. Inasmuch as we are incarnate beings, violence is our lot.
Maurice Merleau Ponty
#81. Because we are in the world, we are condemned to meaning, and we cannot do or say anything without its acquiring a name in history.
Maurice Merleau Ponty
#82. There is nothing to be seen beyond our horizons, but other landscapes and still other horizons, and nothing inside the thing but other smaller things.
Maurice Merleau Ponty
#83. The number and richness of man's signifiers always surpasses the set of defined objects that could be termed signifieds. The symbolic function must always precede its object and does not encounter reality except when it precedes it into the imaginary ...
Maurice Merleau Ponty
#85. The philosopher will ask himself ... if the criticism we are now suggesting is not the philosophy which presses to the limit that criticism of false gods which Christianity has introduced into our history.
Maurice Merleau Ponty
#89. We might say that we perceive the things themselves, that we are the world that thinks itself
or that the world is at the heart of our flesh.
Maurice Merleau Ponty
#90. There is an intemporal which works on the inside of time, which is, rather, omnitemporal.
Maurice Merleau Ponty
#92. This is an encounter between the human and the non-human, it is something like a behavior of the world.
Maurice Merleau Ponty
#94. Nature gives us a dispersed finality. It is a demonology, full of supranatural forces, not one of which is supernatural. On this terrain of knowledge, one must be polytheist.
Maurice Merleau Ponty
#95. The photograph keeps open the instants which the onrush of time closes up forthwith; it destroys the overtaking, the overlapping, the metamorphosis of time.
Maurice Merleau Ponty
#97. How could it limit its investigation to one sector of reality? How could it help being pluralistic? How could it help finding the same truth everywhere?
Maurice Merleau Ponty
#99. We should be sensitive to the thread of silence from which the tissue of speech is woven.
Maurice Merleau Ponty
#100. The child lives in a world which he unhesitatingly believes accessible to all around him.
Maurice Merleau Ponty
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