To ask for an explanation is to explain the obscure by the more obscure.
MAURICE MERLEAU PONTYI 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.
More Maurice Merleau Ponty Quotes
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Language transcends us and yet we speak.
MAURICE MERLEAU PONTY -
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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The flesh is at the heart of the world.
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We know not through our intellect but through our experience.
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I will never know how you see red and you will never know how I see it. But this separation of consciousness is recognized only after a failure of communication, and our first movement is to believe in an undivided being between us.
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My own words take me by surprise and teach me what to think.
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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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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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We should be sensitive to the thread of silence from which the tissue of speech is woven.
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It is the essence of certainty to be established only with reservations.
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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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Montaigne puts not self-satisfied understanding but a consciousness astonished at itself at the core of human existence.
MAURICE MERLEAU PONTY -
I may speak many languages, but there remains one in which I live.
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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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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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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.
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The world is nothing but ‘world-as-meaning.
MAURICE MERLEAU PONTY -
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 -
The perceived world is the always-presupposed foundation of all rationality, all value, and all existence.
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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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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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It is a great good fortune, as Stendhal said, for one “to have his passion as a profession.
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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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The 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.
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I live in the facial expressions of the other, as I feel him living in mine.
MAURICE MERLEAU PONTY