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
MAURICE MERLEAU PONTY
Maurice Merleau Ponty on language
Maurice Merleau Ponty40 quotes“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.”
More from Maurice Merleau Ponty
To ask for an explanation is to explain the obscure by the more obscure.
Maurice Merleau PontyMaurice Merleau Ponty The world is the natural setting of, and field for, all my thoughts and all my explicit perceptions.
Maurice Merleau PontyMaurice Merleau Ponty We know not through our intellect but through our experience.
Maurice Merleau PontyMaurice Merleau Ponty Montaigne puts not self-satisfied understanding but a consciousness astonished at itself at the core of human existence.
Maurice Merleau PontyMaurice Merleau Ponty The body is to be compared, not to a physical object, but rather to a work of art.
Maurice Merleau PontyMaurice Merleau Ponty I live in the facial expressions of the other, as I feel him living in mine.
Maurice Merleau PontyMaurice 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 PontyMaurice 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 PontyMaurice Merleau Ponty 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 PontyMaurice 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 PontyMaurice 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 PontyMaurice Merleau Ponty The sensate body possesses an art of interrogating the sensible according to its own wishes, an inspired exegesis.
Maurice Merleau PontyMaurice Merleau Ponty The world is nothing but ‘world-as-meaning.
Maurice Merleau PontyMaurice Merleau Ponty It is the mission of the twentieth century to elucidate the irrational.
Maurice Merleau PontyMaurice Merleau Ponty 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 PontyMaurice Merleau Ponty 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 PontyMaurice Merleau Ponty
Original quotes
From our community writers
In this wilderness, Mankind is the animal I fear.
Addison SchmittAddison Schmitt The irony is that he broke the only person he never wanted to hurt.
Krishan PandeyKrishan Pandey I will wait, I am waiting, and I will love you with all the love I posses until this body is ash and I begin my search for you again.
Tyler Knott GregsonTyler Knott Gregson Nothing is permanent not even your pain.
Taj AroraTaj Arora Do not insist me to let you go, you come half hearted like a crescent moon, and you go heart-filled like a full moon which glows.
Nikita GandhiNikita Gandhi I want to fold you into my book, like a petal, so that you’d never leave.
Mira R. AridiMira R. Aridi It seems strange how we look in the same mirror, yet what stares back, is so painfully different.
Chris AllchinChris Allchin Do not measure yourself by success, failure, or a degree. Measure your life by the dreams you have.
Natalie MooneyNatalie Mooney
Meet the writers
More on language
My body has always been a stranger. And it aches in a language I don’t understand.
Blake AudenBlake Auden Sometimes I am a different character in different languages. I have different enjoyment from them. Sometimes different answers come out of me. Like, I didnt even know that about me. I get to know myself through different languages, actually.
Roger FedererRoger Federer Understand my soul – it’s the only love language I care for you to know.
Ana DeeAna Dee I speak the truth but I guess that’s a foreign language to ya’ll!
Lil WayneLil Wayne The tie of language is perhaps the strongest and the most durable that can unite mankind.
Alexis de TocquevilleAlexis de Tocqueville We are trapped by language to such a degree that every attempt to formulate insight is a play on words.
Niels BohrNiels Bohr What is that we human beings ultimately depend on? We depend on our words. We are suspended in language. Our task is to communicate experience and ideas to others.
Niels BohrNiels Bohr When it comes to atoms, language can be used only as in poetry.
Niels BohrNiels Bohr