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 PONTYThe body is our general medium for having a world.
More Maurice Merleau Ponty Quotes
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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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Montaigne puts not self-satisfied understanding but a consciousness astonished at itself at the core of human existence.
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The flesh is at the heart of the world.
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The body is our general medium for having a world.
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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 -
The world is the natural setting of, and field for, all my thoughts and all my explicit perceptions.
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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 world is nothing but ‘world-as-meaning.
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It is the mission of the twentieth century to elucidate the irrational.
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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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The perceived world is the always-presupposed foundation of all rationality, all value, and all existence.
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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 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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To ask for an explanation is to explain the obscure by the more obscure.
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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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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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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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I may speak many languages, but there remains one in which I live.
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Language transcends us and yet we speak.
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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 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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It is the essence of certainty to be established only with reservations.
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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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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.
MAURICE MERLEAU PONTY -
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.
MAURICE MERLEAU PONTY