Maurice Merleau-Ponty

We know not through our intellect but through our experience.

— Maurice Merleau-Ponty

“What exists are not separated animals, but an inter-animality.”

— Maurice Merleau-Ponty

Language transcends us and yet we speak.

— Maurice Merleau-Ponty

“We are caught in a secret history, in a forest of symbols.”

— Maurice Merleau-Ponty

“Production: not a tree, but bushes of several roots mixed together.”

— Maurice Merleau-Ponty

“Concepts for a philosopher are only nets for catching sense.”

— Maurice Merleau-Ponty

“An abyss is not nothing; it has environs & edges.”

— Maurice Merleau-Ponty

The flesh is at the heart of the world.

— Maurice Merleau-Ponty

“Memory deforms reality, which nevertheless is formed as reality only in memory”

— Maurice Merleau-Ponty

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

— Maurice Merleau-Ponty

“A ‘world’ has dimensions. By definition they are not the sole possible ones.”

— Maurice Merleau-Ponty

“Where are we to put the limit between the body and the world, since the world is flesh?”

— Maurice Merleau-Ponty

“Expression is like a step taken in the fog--no one can say where, if anywhere, it will lead.”

— Maurice Merleau-Ponty

“The unfurling of the animal is like a pure wake that is related to no boat.”

— Maurice Merleau-Ponty

“Nothingness is like the point of the stroboscopic spiral, which is who knows where, which is 'nobody.”

— Maurice Merleau-Ponty

“If I wanted to render precisely the perceptual experience, I ought to say that 'one' perceives in me, and not that I…

— Maurice Merleau-Ponty

“We do not have a choice between purity and violence but between different kinds of violence. Inasmuch as we are incarnate beings,…

— Maurice Merleau-Ponty

Thought without language, says Lavelle, would not be a purer thought; it would be no more than the intention to think. And…

— Maurice Merleau-Ponty

The photograph keeps open the instants which the onrush of time closes up forthwith; it destroys the overtaking, the overlapping, the metamorphosis…

— Maurice Merleau-Ponty

“What resists phenomenology within us--natural being, the 'barbarian' source Schelling spoke of--cannot remain outside phenomenology. The philosopher must bear his shadow, which…

— Maurice Merleau-Ponty

“There is a knowledge of place which is reducible to a sort of co-existence with that place, and which is not simply…

— Maurice Merleau-Ponty

“The words most charged with philosophy are not necessarily those that contain what they say, but rather those that most energetically open…

— Maurice Merleau-Ponty

“The whole architecture of the notions of psychology... as differentiations of one sole and massive adhesion to being which is the flesh…

— Maurice Merleau-Ponty

I am not in front of my body, I am in it or rather I am it... If we can still speak…

— 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…

— Maurice Merleau-Ponty

“There is no universal clock, but local histories take form beneath our eyes, and begin to regulate themselves, and haltingly are linked…

— Maurice Merleau-Ponty

“The thing can never be separated from someone who perceives it; nor can it ever actually be in itself because its articulations…

— Maurice Merleau-Ponty

The full meaning of a language is never translatable into another. We may speak several languages but one of them always remains…

— Maurice Merleau-Ponty

“The negative principle is less identity-with-self than non-difference-with-self. This absence becomes a factor only by negation of its own negation. It is…

— Maurice Merleau-Ponty

“We are already in the being thus described, that we are of it, that between it and us there is Einfühlung. That…

— Maurice Merleau-Ponty

My hold on the past and the future is precarious and my possession of my own time is always postponed until a…

— 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…

— Maurice Merleau-Ponty

“Said by whom? Said to whom? Not by a mind to a mind, but by a being who has body and language…

— Maurice Merleau-Ponty

“My past has its space, its paths, its nameplaces, and its monuments. Beneath the crossed but distinct orders of succession and simultaneity,…

— Maurice Merleau-Ponty

“It is because we are through and through compounded of relationships with the world that for us the only way to become…

— Maurice Merleau-Ponty

“The present still holds on to the immediate past without positing it as an object, and since the immediate past similarly holds…

— Maurice Merleau-Ponty

“Language signifies when instead of copying thought it lets itself be taken apart and put together again by thought. Language bears the…

— Maurice Merleau-Ponty

“Visible and mobile, my body is a thing among things; it is one of them. It is caught in the fabric of…

— Maurice Merleau-Ponty

“So, ‘sensation’ and ‘judgment’ have together lost their apparent clearness: we have observed that they were clear only as long as the…

— Maurice Merleau-Ponty

“Science and philosophy have for centuries been sustained by unquestioning faith in perception. Perception opens a window on to things. This means…

— Maurice Merleau-Ponty