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 PONTYNothing 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 PONTYThe body is our general medium for having a world.
MAURICE MERLEAU PONTYWe should be sensitive to the thread of silence from which the tissue of speech is woven.
MAURICE MERLEAU PONTYLike the weaver, the writer works on the wrong side of his material. He has only to do with the language, and it is thus that he suddenly finds himself surrounded by sense.
MAURICE MERLEAU PONTYThe flesh is at the heart of the world.
MAURICE MERLEAU PONTYThe world is nothing but ‘world-as-meaning.
MAURICE MERLEAU PONTYEveryone 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 PONTYLanguage transcends us and yet we speak.
MAURICE MERLEAU PONTYThinking 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 PONTYOur 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 PONTYWe know not through our intellect but through our experience.
MAURICE MERLEAU PONTYMy own words take me by surprise and teach me what to think.
MAURICE MERLEAU PONTYThe world is the natural setting of, and field for, all my thoughts and all my explicit perceptions.
MAURICE MERLEAU PONTYI 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 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.
MAURICE MERLEAU PONTYThe world is the natural setting of, and field for, all my thoughts and all my explicit perceptions. Truth does not inhabit only the inner man, or more accurately, there is no inner man, man is in the world, and only in the world does he know himself.
MAURICE MERLEAU PONTY