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 PONTYMachiavelli 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.
More Maurice Merleau Ponty Quotes
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We know not through our intellect but through our experience.
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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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It is the mission of the twentieth century to elucidate the irrational.
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The phenomenological world is not the bringing to explicit expression of a pre-existing being, but the laying down of being. Philosophy is not the reflection of a pre-existing truth, but, like art, the act of bringing truth into being.
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The perceived world is the always-presupposed foundation of all rationality, all value, and all existence.
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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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The photograph keeps open the instants which the onrush of time closes up forthwith; it destroys the overtaking, the overlapping, the metamorphosis of time.
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The flesh is at the heart of the world.
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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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Montaigne puts not self-satisfied understanding but a consciousness astonished at itself at the core of human 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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The world is nothing but ‘world-as-meaning.
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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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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.
MAURICE MERLEAU PONTY