Quotes from Maurice Merleau-Ponty

It is a great good fortune, as Stendhal said, for one "to have his passion as a profession.

Everyone is alone and yet nobody can do without other people, not just because they are useful... but also when it comes to happiness.

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.

Socrates reminds us that it is not the same thing, but almost the opposite, to understand religion and to accept it.

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

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.

It is the mission of the twentieth century to elucidate the irrational.

The body is to be compared, not to a physical object, but rather to a work of art.

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

We know not through our intellect but through our experience.

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.

The body is our general medium for having a world.

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.

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.

Language transcends us and yet we speak.

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.

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.

To ask for an explanation is to explain the obscure by the more obscure.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The flesh is at the heart of the world.

The full meaning of a language is never translatable into another. We may speak several languages but one of them always remains the one in which we live. In order completely to assimilate a language it would be necessary to make the world which it expresses one's own and one never does belong to two worlds at once.