It is the mission of the twentieth century to elucidate the irrational.
MAURICE MERLEAU PONTYThe perceived world is the always-presupposed foundation of all rationality, all value, and all existence.
More Maurice Merleau Ponty Quotes
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To understand is to experience harmony between what we aim at and what is given, between the intention and the performance – and the body is our anchorage in the world.
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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 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 body is our general medium for having a world.
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The child lives in a world which he unhesitatingly believes accessible to all around him.
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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.
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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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It is a great good fortune, as Stendhal said, for one “to have his passion as a profession.
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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.
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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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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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Visible 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.
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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 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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The flesh is at the heart of the world.
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I may speak many languages, but there remains one in which I live.
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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 world is nothing but ‘world-as-meaning.
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To ask for an explanation is to explain the obscure by the more obscure.
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Socrates reminds us that it is not the same thing, but almost the opposite, to understand religion and to accept it.
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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 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.
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The perceived world is the always-presupposed foundation of all rationality, all value, and all existence.
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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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My own words take me by surprise and teach me what to think.
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The sensate body possesses an art of interrogating the sensible according to its own wishes, an inspired exegesis.
MAURICE MERLEAU PONTY