Top 80 Maurice Merleau-Ponty Quotes of All time - Quotes.Pub

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The concept of Nature does not evoke only the residue of what had not been constructed by me, but also a productivity which is not ours, although we can use it – that is, an originary productivity that continues beneath the artificial creations of man. It both partakes of the most ancient, and is something always new.

If we want to both inhabit our body and know it, we must be simultaneously ourselves and another.

Behavior develops ‘in a spiral’... Every motor theme of embryonic life can be considered as a theme that will be elaborated at a higher level in postnatal life.

It has always been easy to hide violence with declarations of peace.

We are in the world, mingled with it, compromised with it.

Phenomenological or existential philosophy assigns itself the task, not of explaining the world or of discovering its “conditions of possibility,” but rather of formulating an experience of the world, a contact with the world which precedes all thought about the world.

The wonderful thing about language is that it promotes its own oblivion.

A science without philosophy would literally not know what it was talking about. A philosophy without methodological exploration of phenomena would end up with nothing but formal truths, which is to say, errors.

Two things are certain about freedom: that we are never determined and yet that we never change, that, retrospectively, we can always find in our past the anticipation of what we have become.

There is already a kind of presence of the other in me.

We situate ourselves in ourselves and in the things, in ourselves and in the other, and at the point where, by a sort of chiasm, we become the others and we become the world.

Rather than a mind and a body, man is a mind with a body, a being who can only get to the truth of things because its body is, as it were, embedded in those things.

There is a kinship between the concepts of nature and radical contingency.

To think is not having but not having.

Personal life, expression, knowledge, and history advance obliquely, and not directly, toward ends or toward concepts. That which is sought too deliberately is not obtained.

The origin of language is mythic; that is, there is always a language before language, which is perception.

Freedom exists in contact with the world, not outside it.

We must accept at the same time a historical and social explanation of psychoanalysis and a psychoanalysis of the history and social facts.

Instead of an intelligible world there are radiant nebulae separated by expanses of darkness.

Everything is science and everything is philosophy.

The idea of tradition is this double movement: being other in order to be the same, forgetting in order to conserve, producing in order to receive, looking ahead in order to receive the entire force of the past.

Revolutions are true as movements and false as regimes.

What we call ‘natural’ is frequently no more than bad theory.

To abstain from violence toward the violent is to become their accomplice.

I do not believe that what one gives to the sciences is taken from philosophy.

History flows neither from the past nor to the future alone: it reverses its course and, when you get right down to it, flows from all the presents.

This passage from the indeterminate to the determinate, this continuous taking up again of its own history in the unity of a new sense, is thought itself.

So it is fairly widely recognised that the relationship between human beings and things is no longer one of distance and mastery such as that which obtained between the sovereign mind and the piece of wax in Descartes’ famous description. Rather, the relationship is less clear-cut: vertiginous proximity prevents us both from apprehending ourselves as a pure intellect separate from things and from defining things as pure objects lacking in all human attributes.

Everything written has a political bearing, even in the case of a study on bees.

There is no universal clock, but local histories take form beneath our eyes, and begin to regulate themselves, and haltingly are linked to one another and demand to live, and confirm the powerful in the wisdom which the immensity of the risks and the consciousness of their own disorder had given them. The world is more present to itself in all its parts than it ever was.

There is nothing to be seen beyond our horizons, but other landscapes and still other horizons, and nothing inside the thing but other smaller things.

Stiftung is not enveloping thought, but open thought, not the intended and Vorhabe of an actual center, but an ‘off-center’ which will be rectified, not the positing of an end, but the positing of a style, not a frontal grasp but a lateral divergence, algae brought back from the depths.

I rediscover the world – which I had distinguished from myself as a sum of things or of processes tied together through causal relations – ‘in myself’ as the permanent horizon of all of my thoughts and as a dimension in relation to which I never cease situating myself.

In advocating nonviolence one reinforces established violence.

True 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 that I see, I am an intersubjective field, not despite my body and historical situation, but, on the contrary, by being this body and this situation, and though them, all the rest.

From now on the tasks of literature and philosophy can no longer be separated. When one is concerned with giving voice to the experience of the world and showing how consciousness escapes into the world, one can no longer credit oneself with attaining a perfect transparence of expression. Philosophical expression assumes the same ambiguities as literary expression, if the world is such that it cannot be expressed except in “stories” and, as it were, pointed at.

There is an adherence, a strange kinship between the human and the animal... of the animal as variant of humanity and of humanity as variant of animality.

There is an intemporal which works on the inside of time, which is, rather, omnitemporal.

Violence is the common origin of all regimes. Life, discussion, and political choice occur only against a background of violence.

Matter is ‘pregnant’ with its form.

The world is inseparable from the subject, but from a subject which is nothing but a project of the world, and the subject is inseparable from the world, but from a world which the subject itself projects.

How do we know that it refers to the past? That is the real problem of memory.

We are human precisely insofar as we always intend a singularity across the thickness of our lives, insofar as we are grouped around this unique interior where there is no one, which is latent, veiled, and escapes from us always leaving behind in our hands truth which are like traces of its absence.

The imaginary is lodged in the world.

Each one of us knows for his own part that the world as it is, is unacceptable.

We struggle with dream figures and our blows fall on living faces.

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.

To see the object is to plunge into it.

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...

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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