Quotes by Maurice Merleau-Ponty

“Being established in my life, buttressed by my thinking nature, fastened down in this transcendental field which was opened for me by my first perception, and in which all absence is merely the obv...”

“So, sensation and judgment have together lost their apparent clearness: we have observed that they were clear only as long as the prejudice in favour of the world was maintained. As soon as one tri...”

“Science and philosophy have for centuries been sustained by unquestioning faith in perception. Perception opens a window on to things. This means that it is directed, quasi-teleologically, towards ...”

“Language signifies when instead of copying thought it lets itself be taken apart and put together again by thought. Language bears the sense of thought as a footprint signifies the movement and eff...”

“The flesh is at the heart of the world.”

“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 ...”

“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 p...”

“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.”

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

“the real is coherent and probable because it is real, and 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.”

“Our view of man will remain superficial so long as we fail to go back to that origin [of silence], so long as we fail to find, beneath the chatter of words, the primordial silence, and as long as w...”

“The perception of other people and the intersubjective world is problematic only for adults. The child lives in a world which he unhesitatingly believes accessible to all around him. He has no awar...”

“Humanity is not an aggregate of individuals, a community of thinkers, each of whom is guaranteed from the outset to be able to reach agreement with the others because all participate in the same th...”

“The number and richness of mans 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 r...”

“The destruction of sight, wherever the injuries be sustained, follows the same law: all colours are aected in the rst place, and lose their saturation. Then the spectrum is simplied, being reduced ...”

“The body is our general medium for having a world.”

“If I walk along a shore towards a ship which has run aground, and the funnel or masts merge into the forest bordering on the sand dune, there will be a moment when these details suddenly become par...”

“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.”

“This also means that philosophy itself must not take itself as established in the truths it has managed to utter, that philosophy is an ever-renewed experiment of its own beginning, and finally, th...”