I may speak many languages, but there remains one in which I live.
MAURICE MERLEAU PONTYNothing 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.
More Maurice Merleau Ponty Quotes
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The child lives in a world which he unhesitatingly believes accessible to all around him.
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The sensate body possesses an art of interrogating the sensible according to its own wishes, an inspired exegesis.
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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.
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It is the mission of the twentieth century to elucidate the irrational.
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The world is the natural setting of, and field for, all my thoughts and all my explicit perceptions.
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It is the essence of certainty to be established only with reservations.
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Because we are in the world, we are condemned to meaning, and we cannot do or say anything without its acquiring a name in history.
MAURICE MERLEAU PONTY -
The perceived world is the always-presupposed foundation of all rationality, all value, and all existence.
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To ask for an explanation is to explain the obscure by the more obscure.
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Socrates reminds us that it is not the same thing, but almost the opposite, to understand religion and to accept it.
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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 -
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 -
Montaigne puts not self-satisfied understanding but a consciousness astonished at itself at the core of human existence.
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My own words take me by surprise and teach me what to think.
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It is a great good fortune, as Stendhal said, for one “to have his passion as a profession.
MAURICE MERLEAU PONTY