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It is the essence of certainty to be established only with reservations.

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

Atheist Definition Join Place Thinking Touch Word
We should be sensitive to the thread of silence from which the tissue of speech is woven.
MAURICE MERLEAU PONTY

Silence Thread Tissue
We know not through our intellect but through our experience.
MAURICE MERLEAU PONTY

Experience Intellectual Ourselves
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 flesh is at the heart of the world.
MAURICE MERLEAU PONTY

Heart World
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 PONTY

Determination Open Start World
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

End Man Meaning Rule Service Talk
To ask for an explanation is to explain the obscure by the more obscure.
MAURICE MERLEAU PONTY

Explanation Obscure
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
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

Complete Conflict Feeling Hide Politics Show
The world is the natural setting of, and field for, all my thoughts and all my explicit perceptions. Truth does not inhabit only the inner man, or more accurately, there is no inner man, man is in the world, and only in the world does he know himself.
MAURICE MERLEAU PONTY

Himself Natural Perception State Thinking Truth World
Language transcends us and yet we speak.
MAURICE MERLEAU PONTY

Language Talk Transcend
The body is our general medium for having a world.
MAURICE MERLEAU PONTY

Body Medium World
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

Language Material Surround Weave Work Writing
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
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