Maurice Merleau-Ponty Quotes

We know not through our intellect but through our experience.

We should be sensitive to the thread of silence from which the tissue of speech is woven.

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.

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.

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.

The body is our general medium for having a world.

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.

I live in the facial expressions of the other, as I feel him living in mine.

The body is to be compared, not to a physical object, but rather to a work of art.

The photograph keeps open the instants which the onrush of time closes up forthwith; it destroys the overtaking, the overlapping, the metamorphosis of time.

Like the weaver, the writer works on the wrong side of his material. He has only to do with the language, and it is thus that he suddenly finds himself surrounded by sense.

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.

Socrates reminds us that it is not the same thing, but almost the opposite, to understand religion and to accept it.

The child lives in a world which he unhesitatingly believes accessible to all around him.

Everyone is alone and yet nobody can do without other people, not just because they are useful... but also when it comes to happiness.

[The sensate body possesses] an art of interrogating the sensible according to its own wishes, an inspired exegesis.

Speech is not a means in the service of an external end. It contains its own rule of usage, ethics, and view of the world, as a gesture sometimes bears the whole truth about a man.

Language transcends us and yet we speak.

My own words take me by surprise and teach me what to think.

To ask for an explanation is to explain the obscure by the more obscure.

The world is nothing but 'world-as-meaning.

I may speak many languages, but there remains one in which I live.

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.

The world is... the natural setting of, and field for, all my thoughts and all my explicit perceptions.

The perceived world is the always-presupposed foundation of all rationality, all value, and all existence.

The flesh is at the heart of the world.

It is a great good fortune, as Stendhal said, for one "to have his passion as a profession.

It is the mission of the twentieth century to elucidate the irrational.

It is the essence of certainty to be established only with reservations.

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.

Montaigne [puts] not self-satisfied understanding but a consciousness astonished at itself at the core of human existence.

We know not through our intellect but through our Experience

the real is coherent and probable because it is real, and not real because it is coherent...

...the real is coherent and probable because it is real, not real because it is coherent...

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.