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Montaigne puts not self-satisfied understanding but a consciousness astonished at itself at the core of human existence.

Maurice Merleau Ponty

The child lives in a world which he unhesitatingly believes accessible to all around him.
MAURICE MERLEAU PONTY

Believe Children Hesitate Live 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
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 photograph keeps open the instants which the onrush of time closes up forthwith; it destroys the overtaking, the overlapping, the metamorphosis of time.
MAURICE MERLEAU PONTY

Close Destroy Instant Open Photograph Time
To ask for an explanation is to explain the obscure by the more obscure.
MAURICE MERLEAU PONTY

Explanation Obscure
The world is nothing but ‘world-as-meaning.
MAURICE MERLEAU PONTY

Meaning World
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
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
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
We must therefore rediscover, after the natural world, the social world, not as an object or sum of objects, but as a permanent field or dimension of existence.
MAURICE MERLEAU PONTY

Dimension Discover Existence Natural Object 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
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
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
Socrates reminds us that it is not the same thing, but almost the opposite, to understand religion and to accept it.
MAURICE MERLEAU PONTY

Acceptance Religion Reminder Understand
The perceived world is the always-presupposed foundation of all rationality, all value, and all existence.
MAURICE MERLEAU PONTY

Existence Foundation Value World
We should be sensitive to the thread of silence from which the tissue of speech is woven.
MAURICE MERLEAU PONTY

Silence Thread Tissue