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 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.
More Maurice Merleau Ponty Quotes
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It is a great good fortune, as Stendhal said, for one “to have his passion as a profession.
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Like 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.
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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.
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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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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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The number and richness of man’s signifiers always surpasses the set of defined objects that could be termed signifieds. The symbolic function must always precede its object and does not encounter reality except when it precedes it into the imaginary.
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I may speak many languages, but there remains one in which I live.
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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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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 perceived world is the always-presupposed foundation of all rationality, all value, and all existence.
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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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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 flesh is at the heart of the world.
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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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My own words take me by surprise and teach me what to think.
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I live in the facial expressions of the other, as I feel him living in mine.
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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.
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Language transcends us and yet we speak.
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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.
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To ask for an explanation is to explain the obscure by the more obscure.
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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.
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The body is our general medium for having a world.
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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.
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The philosopher will ask himself if the criticism we are now suggesting is not the philosophy which presses to the limit that criticism of false gods which Christianity has introduced into our history.
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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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It is the mission of the twentieth century to elucidate the irrational.
MAURICE MERLEAU PONTY