“We carry in our incarnate being the alphabet & the grammar of life, but this does not presuppose an achieved meaning either… — Maurice Merleau-Ponty Copy Share Image
Lichtenberg ... held something of the following kind: one should neither affirm the existence of God nor deny it. ... It is… — Maurice Merleau-Ponty Copy Share Image
“Personal life, expression, knowledge, and history advance obliquely, and not directly, toward ends or toward concepts. That which is sought too deliberately… — Maurice Merleau-Ponty Copy Share Image
All thought of something is at the same time self-consciousness [...] At the root of all our experiences and all our reflections,… — Maurice Merleau-Ponty Copy Share Image
Existence permeates sexuality and vice versa, so that it is impossible to determine, in a given decision or action, the proportion of… — Maurice Merleau-Ponty Copy Share Image
“Evolution, life, physis, appear here as enveloping with regard to ‘consciousness’ of human knowledge.” — Maurice Merleau-Ponty Copy Share Image
Our own body is in the world as the heart is in the organism: it keeps the visible spectacle constantly alive, it… — Maurice Merleau-Ponty Copy Share Image
Montaigne [puts] not self-satisfied understanding but a consciousness astonished at itself at the core of human existence. — Maurice Merleau-Ponty Copy Share Image
We must therefore rediscover, after the natural world, the social world, not as an object or sum of objects, but as a… — Maurice Merleau-Ponty Copy Share Image
“It is the unconscious which chooses what aspect of us will be admitted to official existence.” — Maurice Merleau-Ponty Copy Share Image
“Perhaps the truth is simply that one would need many lives to enter each realm of experience with the total abandon it… — Maurice Merleau-Ponty Copy Share Image
Being established in my life, buttressed by my thinking nature, fastened down in this transcendental field which was opened for me by… — Maurice Merleau-Ponty Copy Share Image
Theology recognizes the contingency of human existence only to derive it from a necessary being, that is, to remove it. Theology makes… — Maurice Merleau-Ponty Copy Share Image
The perceived world is the always-presupposed foundation of all rationality, all value, and all existence. — Maurice Merleau-Ponty Copy Share Image
“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 Copy Share Image
“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 Copy Share Image
Science manipulates things and gives up living in them. It makes its own limited models of things; operating upon these indices or variables to… — Maurice Merleau-Ponty Copy Share Image
“The unfinished nature of phenomenology and the inchoate style in which it proceeds are not the signs of failure; they were inevitable because phenomenology’s… — Maurice Merleau-Ponty Copy Share Image
We should be sensitive to the thread of silence from which the tissue of speech is woven. — Maurice Merleau-Ponty Copy Share Image
“Man is hidden, well hidden, & this time we must make no mistake about it: this does not mean that he is there beneath… — Maurice Merleau-Ponty Copy Share Image
“There is no universal clock, but local histories take form beneath our eyes, and begin to regulate themselves, and haltingly are linked to one… — Maurice Merleau-Ponty Copy Share Image
We know not through our intellect but through our experience. — Maurice Merleau-Ponty Copy Share Image
“There are several ways for a body to be a body, and several ways for consciousness to be consciousness.” — Maurice Merleau-Ponty Copy Share Image
“We do not have the right to level out all experience into a single world.” — Maurice Merleau-Ponty Copy Share Image
“The world and reason are not problems; and though we might call them mysterious, this mystery is essential to them, there can be no… — Maurice Merleau-Ponty Copy Share Image
“Expression is like a step taken in the fog--no one can say where, if anywhere, it will lead.” — Maurice Merleau-Ponty Copy Share Image