Montaigne puts not self-satisfied understanding but a consciousness astonished at itself at the core of human existence.
MAURICE MERLEAU PONTYWe should be sensitive to the thread of silence from which the tissue of speech is woven.
More Maurice Merleau Ponty Quotes
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The world is nothing but ‘world-as-meaning.
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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 flesh is at the heart of the world.
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The perceived world is the always-presupposed foundation of all rationality, all value, and all existence.
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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 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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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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The body is to be compared, not to a physical object, but rather to a work of art.
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I may speak many languages, but there remains one in which I live.
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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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I live in the facial expressions of the other, as I feel him living in mine.
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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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The sensate body possesses an art of interrogating the sensible according to its own wishes, an inspired exegesis.
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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 world is the natural setting of, and field for, all my thoughts and all my explicit perceptions.
MAURICE MERLEAU PONTY