Quotes from Maurice Merleau-Ponty

The first word...translates an affective state.

Signification arouses speech as the world arouses my body--by a mute presence which awakens my intentions without deploying itself before them. In me as well as in the listener who finds it in hearing me, the significative intention (even if it is subsequently to fructify in 'thoughts') is at the moment no more than a determinate gap to be filled by words--the excess of what I intend to say over what is being said or has already been said.

Tlie algorithm, the project of a universal language, is a revolt against language in its existing state and a refusal to depend upon the confusions of everyday language.

Each one can be, according to the moment, I or You or They....Insofar as we live in language, we are not only I; we haunt all grammatical persons, as we are at their intersection, at their crossroads, at their tuft.

The true termary dialectic does not realize the synthesis, not even in the future...realization...would be death...The dialectic requires permanent revolution, that is, the self-contestimg of power, which, therefore, should not be considered as absolute

A pre-self, a latent ego that remains in ignorance of itself, because it has not yet encountered in others a limit to the self.

The senses, and one's own body overall, present the mystery of a whole that, without leaving behind its haeccity and its particularity, emits beyond itself significations capable of offering a framework for an entire series of thoughts and experiences.

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

Existence turning back upon itself but without succeeding in carrying itself away.

We perceive others as reflections and at the same time as lacunae in relation to ourselves. In effect, it is like a forbidden zone...With others, it will always be impossible to perceive them in their totalities--that is, to perceive them as they perceive themselves.

The unthought can only appear through contact.

Perhaps ultimate knowledge is a knowledge-question, the interrogative mode proper to Being...Being, in other words, is the mute interlocutor of our questions, that which makes way for our interrogation and which our answers do not contain since they take the enigma away from it.

The person himself must be understood as institution, not as consciousness of...

Nature starts from the unknowable and finishes consciously. Inversely, art starts from certain conscious thoughts and finishes in something that can be perpetually taken up again. Art attains the Absolute because at that moment consciousness attains the unconscious.

The structure 'world,' with its double movement of sedimentation and spontaneity, is at the center of consciousness.

Perhaps it is essential to men to attain greatness in their works only when they do not look for it too hard.

Taken concretely, man is not a psyche joined to an organism, but rather this back-and-forth of existence that sometimes allows itself to exist as a body and sometimes carries itself into personal acts. Psychological motives and bodily events can overlap because there is no single movement in a living body that is an absolute accident with regard to psychical intentions and no single psychical act that has not found at least its germ or its general outline in physiological dispositions.

Everything is offered up to a truth that is emergent and possessed by anyone. The delicate point is that this truth should be realized neither beyond the world, as it is by those who go to Mass, nor on this side of it, as it is for the Marxists.

We are entirely enclosed in our time and institutions, we can fight against it only with it, indirectly, from the inside.

This dialogue between the subject and the object, where the subject takes the sense scattered across the object and the object gathers together the subjec's intentions, namely, physiognomic perception, arranges a world around the subject that speaks to him on the topic of himself and places his own thoughts in the world.

The question is to know whether, as Sartre says, there are only humans and things or whether there is also the interworld, which we call history, symbolism, truth-to-be-made.

I do not perceive any more than I speak--Perception has me as has language--And as it is necessary that all the same I be there in order to speak, I must be there in order to perceive--But in what sense? As one--What is it that, from my side, comes to animate the perceived world and language?

The truth of a social system lies in the type of human relations it makes possible.

The awareness of truth advances like a crab, turned towardits point of departure, toward that structure whose signification it expresses.