The sensate body possesses an art of interrogating the sensible according to its own wishes, an inspired exegesis.
MAURICE MERLEAU PONTYThe body is to be compared, not to a physical object, but rather to a work of art.
More Maurice Merleau Ponty Quotes
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We should be sensitive to the thread of silence from which the tissue of speech is woven.
MAURICE MERLEAU PONTY -
The philosopher will ask himself if the criticism we are now suggesting is not the philosophy which presses to the limit that criticism of false gods which Christianity has introduced into our history.
MAURICE MERLEAU PONTY -
Language transcends us and yet we speak.
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.
MAURICE MERLEAU PONTY -
Thinking which displaces, or otherwise defines, the sacred has been called atheistic, and that philosophy which does not place it here or there, like a thing, but at the joining of things and words, will always be exposed to this reproach without ever being touched by it.
MAURICE MERLEAU PONTY -
The flesh is at the heart of the world.
MAURICE MERLEAU PONTY -
The child lives in a world which he unhesitatingly believes accessible to all around him.
MAURICE MERLEAU PONTY -
It is a great good fortune, as Stendhal said, for one “to have his passion as a profession.
MAURICE MERLEAU PONTY -
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 -
Socrates reminds us that it is not the same thing, but almost the opposite, to understand religion and to accept it.
MAURICE MERLEAU PONTY -
I live in the facial expressions of the other, as I feel him living in mine.
MAURICE MERLEAU PONTY -
I may speak many languages, but there remains one in which I live.
MAURICE MERLEAU PONTY -
The body is our general medium for having a world.
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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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.
MAURICE MERLEAU PONTY






