black
grey
blue
red
brown
white

To ask for an explanation is to explain the obscure by the more obscure.

Maurice Merleau Ponty

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

Expression Facial Live Myself
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
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
It is the essence of certainty to be established only with reservations.
MAURICE MERLEAU PONTY

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

Believe Children Hesitate Live World
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

Body Instrument Move Object Space
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
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
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
The flesh is at the heart of the world.
MAURICE MERLEAU PONTY

Heart World
Language transcends us and yet we speak.
MAURICE MERLEAU PONTY

Language Talk Transcend
The world is the natural setting of, and field for, all my thoughts and all my explicit perceptions.
MAURICE MERLEAU PONTY

Natural Perception Thinking World
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
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
We know not through our intellect but through our experience.
MAURICE MERLEAU PONTY

Experience Intellectual Ourselves