Maurice Merleau Ponty quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Maurice Merleau Ponty

Maurice Merleau Ponty Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Maurice Merleau Ponty on Wise Famous Quotes.

Any commemoration is also a betrayal.

We struggle with dream figures and our blows fall on living faces.

What exists are not separated animals, but an inter-animality.

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 world is nothing but 'world-as-meaning.

A field tends of itself to multiply.

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.

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.

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

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

There is not identity, nor non-identity, or non-coincidence, there is inside and outside turning about one another.

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

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

Nothingness is like the point of the stroboscopic spiral, which is who knows where, which is 'nobody.

This is an encounter between the human and the non-human, it is something like a behavior of the world.

There is an intemporal which works on the inside of time, which is, rather, omnitemporal.

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

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

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.

We are caught in a secret history, in a forest of symbols.

The flesh is at the heart of the world.

Everything is science and everything is philosophy.

If myths, dreams and illusion are to be possible, the apparent and the real must remain ambiguous in the subject as in the object.

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.

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

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

We know not through our intellect but through our experience.

Each one of us knows for his own part that the world as it is, is unacceptable.

Everything written has a political bearing, even in the case of a study on bees.

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.

There is no more individuated being in the system. We only ever have to deal with families of trajectories.

Concepts for a philosopher are only nets for catching sense.

Activity = passivity.

Philosophy is a will to confront human artifice with its outside, with Nature.

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

There is a kinship between the concepts of nature and radical contingency.

The body is our general medium for having a world.

Where are we to put the limit between the body and the world, since the world is flesh?

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.

To abstain from violence toward the violent is to become their accomplice.

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.

Expression is like a step taken in the fog
no one can say where, if anywhere, it will lead.

Perhaps the truth is simply that one would need many lives to enter each realm of experience with the total abandon it demands.

A regime which is nominally liberal can be oppressive in reality. A regime which acknowledges its violence might have more genuine humanity.

An abyss is not nothing; it has environs & edges.

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

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

It is impossible to be an anti-Communist and it is not possible to be a Communist.

To think is not having but not having.

How do we know that it refers to the past? That is the real problem of memory.

Memory deforms reality, which nevertheless is formed as reality only in memory

Philosophy: circles that include one another.

Evolution, life, physis, appear here as enveloping with regard to 'consciousness' of human knowledge.

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

Language transcends us and yet we speak.

Revolutions are true as movements and false as regimes.

The world and I are within one another.

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

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

We do not have the right to level out all experience into a single world.

Violence is the common origin of all regimes. Life, discussion, and political choice occur only against a background of violence.

Very few philosophers have been anarchists

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.

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

In advocating nonviolence one reinforces established violence.

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.

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

We speak of 'inspiration,' and the word should be taken literally. There really is inspiration and expiration of Being.