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.
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 PONTYIt is the essence of certainty to be established only with reservations.
MAURICE MERLEAU PONTYIt is the mission of the twentieth century to elucidate the irrational.
MAURICE MERLEAU PONTYI 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.
MAURICE MERLEAU PONTYThe child lives in a world which he unhesitatingly believes accessible to all around him.
MAURICE MERLEAU PONTYMontaigne puts not self-satisfied understanding but a consciousness astonished at itself at the core of human existence.
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 PONTYThe perceived world is the always-presupposed foundation of all rationality, all value, and all existence.
MAURICE MERLEAU PONTYThe body is to be compared, not to a physical object, but rather to a work of art.
MAURICE MERLEAU PONTYTo ask for an explanation is to explain the obscure by the more obscure.
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 PONTYIt is a great good fortune, as Stendhal said, for one “to have his passion as a profession.
MAURICE MERLEAU PONTYWe 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 PONTYVisible 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 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 PONTYMy own words take me by surprise and teach me what to think.
MAURICE MERLEAU PONTY