Maurice Merleau-PontyBecause we are in the world, we are condemned to meaning, and we cannot do or say anything without its acquiring a name in history. ✨ Maurice Merleau-Ponty (2002). Phenomeno… ▶352Philosophy
Maurice Merleau-PontyWe know not through our intellect but through our experience.378Life
Maurice Merleau-PontyBeing established in my life, buttressed by my thinking nature, fastened down in this transcendental field which was opened for me by my first perception, and in which all absence… ▶313LifeThought
Maurice Merleau-PontyTrue reflection presents me to myself not as idle and inaccessible subjectivity, but as identical with my presence in the world and to others, as I am now realizing it: I am all t… ▶368ReflectionTimeTruth
Maurice Merleau-PontySpeech 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… ▶313TimeTruth
Maurice Merleau-PontyWe 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 Me… ▶348Life
Maurice Merleau-PontyThe 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 d… ▶327Truth
Maurice Merleau-PontyVisible 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 t… ▶306Philosophy
Maurice Merleau-PontyIt is the mission of the twentieth century to elucidate the irrational.284Hope
Maurice Merleau-PontyI 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 mov… ▶328DeathPhilosophyPolitics
Maurice Merleau-PontyThe 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 tru… ▶284PhilosophyReflectionTruth
Maurice Merleau-PontyAll thought of something is at the same time self-consciousness [...] At the root of all our experiences and all our reflections, we find [...] a being which immediately recognise… ▶274LifeReflectionThought
Maurice Merleau-PontyThe 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 … ▶275ThoughtTruth
Maurice Merleau-PontyThe perceived world is the always-presupposed foundation of all rationality, all value, and all existence. ✨ Maurice Merleau-Ponty, James M. Edie (1964). The Primacy of Perc… ▶3210DeathLifePhilosophy
Maurice Merleau-PontyExistence permeates sexuality and vice versa, so that it is impossible to determine, in a given decision or action, the proportion of sexual to other motivations, impossible to la… ▶232Life
Maurice Merleau-PontyI live in the facial expressions of the other, as I feel him living in mine. ✨ Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Ted Toadvine (2007). The Merleau-Ponty Reader, p.174, Northwestern Univ… ▶3010LifeReading
Maurice Merleau-PontyMachiavelli 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 dial… ▶183PhilosophyPolitics
Maurice Merleau-PontyTo ask for an explanation is to explain the obscure by the more obscure.238Death
Maurice Merleau-PontyThe flesh is at the heart of the world.161Love
Maurice Merleau-PontyThe body is our general medium for having a world. ✨ Maurice Merleau-Ponty (2002). Phenomenology of Perception, p.169, Psychology Press151Truth
Maurice Merleau-PontyNothing 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 Merle… ▶132Reflection
Maurice Merleau-PontyScience manipulates things and gives up living in them. It makes its own limited models of things; operating upon these indices or variables to effect whatever transformations are… ▶155DeathLifePhilosophy
Maurice Merleau-PontyOur view of man will remain superficial so long as we fail to go back to that origin [of silence], so long as we fail to find, beneath the chatter of words, the primordial silence… ▶2010Philosophy
Maurice Merleau-PontyIt is the essence of certainty to be established only with reservations. ✨ Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Thomas Baldwin (2004). Maurice Merleau-Ponty: Basic Writings, p.195, Psycho… ▶199Thought
