The body is to be compared, not to a physical object, but rather to a work of art.
MAURICE MERLEAU PONTYThe world is nothing but ‘world-as-meaning.
More Maurice Merleau Ponty Quotes
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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.
MAURICE MERLEAU PONTY -
The sensate body possesses an art of interrogating the sensible according to its own wishes, an inspired exegesis.
MAURICE MERLEAU PONTY -
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.
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Language transcends us and yet we speak.
MAURICE MERLEAU PONTY -
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 -
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 -
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.
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Montaigne puts not self-satisfied understanding but a consciousness astonished at itself at the core of human existence.
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We should be sensitive to the thread of silence from which the tissue of speech is woven.
MAURICE MERLEAU PONTY -
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 -
I live in the facial expressions of the other, as I feel him living in mine.
MAURICE MERLEAU PONTY -
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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The body is our general medium for having a world.
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It is a great good fortune, as Stendhal said, for one “to have his passion as a profession.
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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