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

Maurice Merleau Ponty

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.
MAURICE MERLEAU PONTY

Experience Goal Harmony Ourselves Understand World
The body is to be compared, not to a physical object, but rather to a work of art.
MAURICE MERLEAU PONTY

Art Body Compare Object Work
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

Close Destroy Instant Open Photograph Time
It is a great good fortune, as Stendhal said, for one “to have his passion as a profession.
MAURICE MERLEAU PONTY

Fortune Greatness Passion Professional
We should be sensitive to the thread of silence from which the tissue of speech is woven.
MAURICE MERLEAU PONTY

Silence Thread Tissue
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.
MAURICE MERLEAU PONTY

Art Existence Expression Philosophy Reflection Truth World
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

Body Oneself Perception Relation Talk
It is the essence of certainty to be established only with reservations.
MAURICE MERLEAU PONTY

Certain Essence Establishment Reservation
Everyone is alone and yet nobody can do without other people, not just because they are useful but also when it comes to happiness.
MAURICE MERLEAU PONTY

Alone Happiness People
Socrates reminds us that it is not the same thing, but almost the opposite, to understand religion and to accept it.
MAURICE MERLEAU PONTY

Acceptance Religion Reminder Understand
My own words take me by surprise and teach me what to think.
MAURICE MERLEAU PONTY

Myself Teaching Thinking Word
Our body is not in space like things; it inhabits or haunts space. It applies itself to space like a hand to an instrument. And when we wish to move about, we do not move the body as we move an object.
MAURICE MERLEAU PONTY

Body Instrument Move Object Space
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

Circle Fabric Mobile See Visible World
I may speak many languages, but there remains one in which I live.
MAURICE MERLEAU PONTY

Language Live Myself Talk
Montaigne puts not self-satisfied understanding but a consciousness astonished at itself at the core of human existence.
MAURICE MERLEAU PONTY

Existence Human Satisfaction Understand
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

Criticism History Introduction Limitation Ourselves Philosophy