Maurice Merleau Ponty Quotes

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.

Everyone is alone and yet nobody can do without other people, not just because they are useful but also when it comes to happiness.

Socrates reminds us that it is not the same thing, but almost the opposite, to understand religion and to accept it.

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.

The flesh is at the heart of the world.

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.

It is a great good fortune, as Stendhal said, for one “to have his passion as a profession.

I may speak many languages, but there remains one in which I live.

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.

It is the essence of certainty to be established only with reservations.