Maurice Merleau-Ponty Quotes and Sayings - Page 1
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“Because 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 -
“We know not through our intellect but through our experience.”
-- Maurice Merleau-Ponty -
“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.”
-- Maurice Merleau-Ponty -
“The body is our general medium for having a world.”
-- Maurice Merleau-Ponty -
“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 -
“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.”
-- Maurice Merleau-Ponty -
“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 -
“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 -
“The world is nothing but 'world-as-meaning.”
-- Maurice Merleau-Ponty -
“We should be sensitive to the thread of silence from which the tissue of speech is woven.”
-- Maurice Merleau-Ponty -
“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.”
-- Maurice Merleau-Ponty -
“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 -
“Montaigne [puts] not self-satisfied understanding but a consciousness astonished at itself at the core of human existence.”
-- Maurice Merleau-Ponty -
“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.”
-- Maurice Merleau-Ponty -
“Like the weaver, the writer works on the wrong side of his material. He has only to do with the language, and it is thus that he suddenly finds himself surrounded by sense.”
-- Maurice Merleau-Ponty -
“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 -
“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.”
-- Maurice Merleau-Ponty -
“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 -
“My own words take me by surprise and teach me what to think.”
-- Maurice Merleau-Ponty -
“It is a great good fortune, as Stendhal said, for one "to have his passion as a profession.”
-- Maurice Merleau-Ponty -
“[The sensate body possesses] an art of interrogating the sensible according to its own wishes, an inspired exegesis”
-- Maurice Merleau-Ponty -
“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...”
-- Maurice Merleau-Ponty -
“I live in the facial expressions of the other, as I feel him living in mine.”
-- Maurice Merleau-Ponty -
“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 -
“The perceived world is the always-presupposed foundation of all rationality, all value, and all existence.”
-- Maurice Merleau-Ponty -
“The flesh is at the heart of the world.”
-- Maurice Merleau-Ponty -
“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.”
-- Maurice Merleau-Ponty -
“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 -
“It is the essence of certainty to be established only with reservations.”
-- Maurice Merleau-Ponty -
“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.”
-- Maurice Merleau-Ponty
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