My own words take me by surprise and teach me what to think.
MAURICE MERLEAU PONTYOur 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.
More Maurice Merleau Ponty Quotes
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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.
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The perceived world is the always-presupposed foundation of all rationality, all value, and all existence.
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I live in the facial expressions of the other, as I feel him living in mine.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Everyone is alone and yet nobody can do without other people, not just because they are useful but also when it comes to happiness.
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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.
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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 -
Montaigne puts not self-satisfied understanding but a consciousness astonished at itself at the core of human existence.
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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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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.
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We know not through our intellect but through our experience.
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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