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 PONTYEveryone is alone and yet nobody can do without other people, not just because they are useful but also when it comes to happiness.
More Maurice Merleau Ponty Quotes
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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.
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The body is to be compared, not to a physical object, but rather to a work of art.
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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.
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I live in the facial expressions of the other, as I feel him living in mine.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Socrates reminds us that it is not the same thing, but almost the opposite, to understand religion and to accept it.
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It is the essence of certainty to be established only with reservations.
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Language transcends us and yet we speak.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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






