Maurice Merleau-Ponty Quotes - Page 2

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

  Maurice Merleau-Ponty

  Passion, Fortune, Said

  Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1988). “In Praise of Philosophy and Other Essays”, p.4, Northwestern University Press

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• As a matter of principle, humanity is precarious: each person can only believe what he recognizes to be true internally and, at the same time, nobody thinks or makes up his mind without already being caught up in certain relationships with others, which leads him to opt for a particular set of opinions.

  Maurice Merleau-Ponty

  Believe, Thinking, Humanity

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• The world is nothing but 'world-as-meaning.

  Maurice Merleau-Ponty

  World

  Maurice Merleau-Ponty (2002). “Phenomenology of Perception”, p.12, Routledge

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• Science 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 permitted by their definition, it comes face to face with the real world only at rare intervals. Science is and always will be that admirably active, ingenious, and bold way of thinking whose fundamental bias is to treat everything as though it were an object-in-general - as though it meant nothing to us and yet was predestined for our own use.

  Maurice Merleau-Ponty

  Giving Up, Real, Thinking

  Maurice Merleau-Ponty, James M. Edie (1964). “The Primacy of Perception: And Other Essays on Phenomenological Psychology, the Philosophy of Art, History and Politics”, p.159, Northwestern University Press

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• 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 through them, all the rest.

  Maurice Merleau-Ponty

  Reflection, Historical, Phenomenology

  Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Thomas Baldwin (2004). “Maurice Merleau-Ponty: Basic Writings”, p.228, Psychology Press

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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

  World, Determine, Contrary

  Maurice Merleau-Ponty (2002). “Phenomenology of Perception”, p.530, Psychology Press

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• Montaigne [puts] not self-satisfied understanding but a consciousness astonished at itself at the core of human existence.

  Maurice Merleau-Ponty

  Self, Understanding, Consciousness

  Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1964). “Signs”, p.203, Northwestern University Press

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• Our 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, and as long as we do not describe the action which breaks this silence. the spoken word is a gesture, and its meaning, a world.

  Maurice Merleau-Ponty

  Men, Views, Long

  Maurice Merleau-Ponty (2002). “Phenomenology of Perception”, p.214, Psychology Press

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• Existence 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 label a decision or act ‘sexual’ or ‘non-sexual’ . There is no outstripping of sexuality any more than there is sexuality enclosed within itself. No one is saved and no one is totally lost.

  Maurice Merleau-Ponty

  Motivation, Decision, Vices

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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.

  Maurice Merleau-Ponty

  Giving, Feelings, Trying

  Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1988). “In Praise of Philosophy and Other Essays”, p.59, Northwestern University Press

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• The child lives in a world which he unhesitatingly believes accessible to all around him.

  Maurice Merleau-Ponty

  Children, Believe, Phenomenology

  Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Thomas Baldwin (2004). “Maurice Merleau-Ponty: Basic Writings”, p.153, Psychology Press

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• It is the mission of the twentieth century to elucidate the irrational.

  Maurice Merleau-Ponty

  Century, Missions, Irrational

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• The full meaning of a language is never translatable into another. We may speak several languages but one of them always remains the one in which we live. In order completely to assimilate a language it would be necessary to make the world which it expresses one's own and one never does belong to two worlds at once.

  Maurice Merleau-Ponty

  Order, Two, Doe

  Maurice Merleau-Ponty (2002). “Phenomenology of Perception”, p.218, Routledge

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• Language transcends us and yet we speak.

  Maurice Merleau-Ponty

  Phenomenology, Language, Speak

  Maurice Merleau-Ponty (2002). “Phenomenology of Perception”, p.456, Routledge

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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

  Art, Wish, Body

  "The Visible and the Invisible". Book by Maurice Merleau-Ponty, p. 135, 1968.

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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.

  Maurice Merleau-Ponty

  Thinking, Expression, Vision

  Maurice Merleau-Ponty (2002). “Phenomenology of Perception”, p.409, Psychology Press

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• Theology recognizes the contingency of human existence only to derive it from a necessary being, that is, to remove it. Theology makes use of philosophical wonder only for the purpose of motivating an affirmation which ends it. Philosophy, on the other hand, arouses us to what is problematic in our own existence and in that of the world, to such a point that we shall never be cured of searching for a solution.

  Maurice Merleau-Ponty

  Philosophy, Philosophical, Hands

  Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1988). “In Praise of Philosophy and Other Essays”, p.44, Northwestern University Press

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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.

  Maurice Merleau-Ponty

  Mean, Men, Views

  Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1964). “Signs”, p.77, Northwestern University Press

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• Lichtenberg ... held something of the following kind: one should neither affirm the existence of God nor deny it. ... It is not that he wished to leave certain perspectives open, nor to please everyone. It is rather that he was identifying himself, for his part, with a consciousness of self, of the world, and of others that was "strange" (the word is his) in a sense which is equally well destroyed by the rival explanations.

  Maurice Merleau-Ponty

  Self, Perspective, World

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• Even those who have desired to work out a completely positive philosophy have been philosophers only to the extent that, at the same time, they have refused the right to install themselves in absolute knowledge. They taught not this knowledge, but its becoming in us, not the absolute but, at most, our absolute relation to it, as Kierkegaard said. What makes a philosopher is the movement which leads back without ceasing from knowledge to ignorance, from ignorance to knowledge, and a kind of rest in this movement.

  Maurice Merleau-Ponty

  Philosophy, Ignorance, Work Out

  Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1988). “In Praise of Philosophy and Other Essays”, p.5, Northwestern University Press

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• 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

  Philosophy, Criticism, Limits

  Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1988). “In Praise of Philosophy and Other Essays”, p.47, Northwestern University Press

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• Being 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 is merely the obverse of a presence, all silence a modality of the being of sound, I enjoy a sort of ubiquity and theoretical eternity, I feel destined to move in a flow of endless life, neither the beginning nor the end of which I can experience in thought, since it is my living self who think of them, and since thus my life always precedes and survives itself.

  Maurice Merleau-Ponty

  Moving, Thinking, Self

  Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Thomas Baldwin (2004). “Maurice Merleau-Ponty: Basic Writings”, p.163, Psychology Press

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• The world is... the natural setting of, and field for, all my thoughts and all my explicit perceptions.

  Maurice Merleau-Ponty

  Perception, World, Fields

  Maurice Merleau-Ponty (2002). “Phenomenology of Perception”, p.12, Psychology Press

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• Thought without language, says Lavelle, would not be a purer thought; it would be no more than the intention to think. And his last book offers a theory of expressiveness which makes of expression not "a faithful image of an already realized interior being, but the very means by which it is realized.

  Maurice Merleau-Ponty

  Book, Mean, Thinking

  Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1968). “In Praise of Philosophy”

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• My hold on the past and the future is precarious and my possession of my own time is always postponed until a stage when I may fully understand it, yet this stage can never be reached, since it would be one more moment bounded by the horizon of its future, and requiring in its turn, further developments in order to be understood.

  Maurice Merleau-Ponty

  Past, Order, Would Be

  Maurice Merleau-Ponty (2002). “Phenomenology of Perception”, p.404, Psychology Press

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