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

“The unfinished nature of phenomenology and the inchoate style in which it proceeds are not the signs of failure; they were inevitable…

— Maurice Merleau-Ponty

We should be sensitive to the thread of silence from which the tissue of speech is woven.

— Maurice Merleau-Ponty

“Man is hidden, well hidden, & this time we must make no mistake about it: this does not mean that he is…

— 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

We know not through our intellect but through our experience.

— Maurice Merleau-Ponty

“There are several ways for a body to be a body, and several ways for consciousness to be consciousness.”

— Maurice Merleau-Ponty

“We do not have the right to level out all experience into a single world.”

— Maurice Merleau-Ponty

“The world and reason are not problems; and though we might call them mysterious, this mystery is essential to them, there can…

— Maurice Merleau-Ponty

“Memory is the irruption of other things in us.”

— 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

“Any commemoration is also a betrayal.”

— 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

Our view of man will remain superficial so long as we fail to go back to that origin [of silence], so long…

— Maurice Merleau-Ponty

“This is an encounter between the human and the non-human, it is something like a behavior of the world.”

— 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

“We struggle with dream figures and our blows fall on living faces.”

— Maurice Merleau-Ponty

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

— 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

To understand is to experience harmony between what we aim at and what is given, between the intention and the performance -…

— Maurice Merleau-Ponty

“The world and Being hold together only in movement; it is only in this way that all things can be together. Philosophy…

— 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

“The perception of other people and the intersubjective world is problematic only for adults. The child lives in a world which he…

— Maurice Merleau-Ponty

“There is no more individuated being in the system. We only ever have to deal with families of trajectories.”

— Maurice Merleau-Ponty

[The sensate body possesses] an art of interrogating the sensible according to its own wishes, an inspired exegesis.

— Maurice Merleau-Ponty