“Said by whom? Said to whom? Not by a mind to a mind, but by a being who has body and language to a being who has body and language, each drawing the other by invisible threads like those who hold the marionettes-making the other speak, think, and become what he is but never would have been by himself. Thus… — Maurice Merleau-Ponty Copy Share
All thought of something is at the same time self-consciousness [...] At the root of all our experiences and all our reflections, we find [...] a being which immediately recognises itself, [...] and which knows its own existence, not by observation and as a given fact, nor by inference from any idea of itself, but through direct contact with that… — Maurice Merleau-Ponty Copy Share
“Now if we rid our minds of the idea that our language is the translation or cipher of an original text, we… — Maurice Merleau-Ponty Copy Share Image
“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 Copy Share Image
The body is to be compared, not to a physical object, but rather to a work of art. — Maurice Merleau-Ponty Copy Share Image
“The word 'image' is in bad repute because we have thoughtlessly believed that a drawing was a tracing, a copy, a second… — 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 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… — Maurice Merleau-Ponty Copy Share
“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 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… — Maurice Merleau-Ponty Copy Share
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