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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.

Maurice Merleau Ponty

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.
MAURICE MERLEAU PONTY

Atheist Definition Join Place Thinking Touch Word
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.
MAURICE MERLEAU PONTY

Complete Conflict Feeling Hide Politics Show
It is a great good fortune, as Stendhal said, for one “to have his passion as a profession.
MAURICE MERLEAU PONTY

Fortune Greatness Passion Professional
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.
MAURICE MERLEAU PONTY

Criticism History Introduction Limitation Ourselves Philosophy
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.
MAURICE MERLEAU PONTY

Definition Function Imagination Man Object Reality Rich
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 PONTY

Language Material Surround Weave Work Writing
The sensate body possesses an art of interrogating the sensible according to its own wishes, an inspired exegesis.
MAURICE MERLEAU PONTY

Art Body Interrogate Possession
I may speak many languages, but there remains one in which I live.
MAURICE MERLEAU PONTY

Language Live Myself Talk
The body is to be compared, not to a physical object, but rather to a work of art.
MAURICE MERLEAU PONTY

Art Body Compare Object Work
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

Body Breathe Form Heart Life System Visible World
I live in the facial expressions of the other, as I feel him living in mine.
MAURICE MERLEAU PONTY

Expression Facial Live Myself
Socrates reminds us that it is not the same thing, but almost the opposite, to understand religion and to accept it.
MAURICE MERLEAU PONTY

Acceptance Religion Reminder Understand
It is the mission of the twentieth century to elucidate the irrational.
MAURICE MERLEAU PONTY

Insane Mission Remove
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

Body Oneself Perception Relation Talk
Montaigne puts not self-satisfied understanding but a consciousness astonished at itself at the core of human existence.
MAURICE MERLEAU PONTY

Existence Human Satisfaction Understand
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.
MAURICE MERLEAU PONTY

Dimension Discover Existence Natural Object World