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 PONTYSpeech 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.
More Maurice Merleau Ponty Quotes
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The body is our general medium for having a world.
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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 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.
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The world is nothing but ‘world-as-meaning.
MAURICE MERLEAU PONTY -
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.
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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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We should be sensitive to the thread of silence from which the tissue of speech is woven.
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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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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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It is a great good fortune, as Stendhal said, for one “to have his passion as a profession.
MAURICE MERLEAU PONTY -
The world is the natural setting of, and field for, all my thoughts and all my explicit perceptions.
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To ask for an explanation is to explain the obscure by the more obscure.
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It is the essence of certainty to be established only with reservations.
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The perceived world is the always-presupposed foundation of all rationality, all value, and all existence.
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We know not through our intellect but through our experience.
MAURICE MERLEAU PONTY