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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

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

Myself Teaching Thinking Word
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
The perceived world is the always-presupposed foundation of all rationality, all value, and all existence.
MAURICE MERLEAU PONTY

Existence Foundation Value World
I live in the facial expressions of the other, as I feel him living in mine.
MAURICE MERLEAU PONTY

Expression Facial Live Myself
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

Body Breathe Form Heart Life System Visible World
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
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
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

History Meaning Name World
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
I will never know how you see red and you will never know how I see it. But this separation of consciousness is recognized only after a failure of communication, and our first movement is to believe in an undivided being between us.
MAURICE MERLEAU PONTY

Color Consciousness Division Failure Recognition Separate Sight
I discover vision, not as a ‘thinking about seeing,’ to use Descartes expression, but as a gaze at grips with a visible world, and that is why for me there can be another’s gaze.
MAURICE MERLEAU PONTY

Discover Expression Myself Vision World
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 sensate body possesses an art of interrogating the sensible according to its own wishes, an inspired exegesis.
MAURICE MERLEAU PONTY

Art Body Interrogate Possession
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
We know not through our intellect but through our experience.
MAURICE MERLEAU PONTY

Experience Intellectual Ourselves
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