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 PONTYMachiavelli 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.
More Maurice Merleau Ponty Quotes
-
-
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.
MAURICE MERLEAU PONTY -
It is the essence of certainty to be established only with reservations.
MAURICE MERLEAU PONTY -
The world is the natural setting of, and field for, all my thoughts and all my explicit perceptions.
MAURICE MERLEAU PONTY -
To ask for an explanation is to explain the obscure by the more obscure.
MAURICE MERLEAU PONTY -
The child lives in a world which he unhesitatingly believes accessible to all around him.
MAURICE MERLEAU PONTY -
The perceived world is the always-presupposed foundation of all rationality, all value, and all existence.
MAURICE MERLEAU PONTY -
The sensate body possesses an art of interrogating the sensible according to its own wishes, an inspired exegesis.
MAURICE MERLEAU PONTY -
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.
MAURICE MERLEAU PONTY -
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 -
The flesh is at the heart of the world.
MAURICE MERLEAU PONTY -
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.
MAURICE MERLEAU PONTY -
My own words take me by surprise and teach me what to think.
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 -
Language transcends us and yet we speak.
MAURICE MERLEAU PONTY