Quotes from Maurice Merleau-Ponty

The sensible world is full of gaps, ellipses, allusions.

Pathological behavior also has meaning. Illness is auto-regulation, an establishment of an equilibrium to a level other than the normal one. It is not a totally incomprehensible one...The normal and the pathological can be considerably enriched by contact with one another.

An expression and what it expresses strangely alternate and, through a sort of false recognition, make us feel that the word has inhabited the thing from all eternity...One of the effects of language is to efface itself to the extent that its expression comes across.

The unity of the object does not lie behind its qualities, but is reaffirmed by each one of them: each of its qualities is the whole. Cézanne said that you should be able to paint the smell of trees.

But therein lies the virtue of language: it is language which propels us toward the things it signifies. In the way it works, language hides itself from us. Its triumph is to efface itself and to take us beyond the words to the author's very thoughts, so that we imagine we are engaged with him in a wordless meeting of minds.

The phenomenon is not the object, nor is it the subject. It is not the object in that it concerns me: in presenting it, I understand myself. It is not the subject in that it still has to become for itself. The phenomenon is the hidden frame of 'subject' and 'object'—object returning to itself, subject outside of itself. -From Philosophy and Non-Philosophy Since Hegel

All observation is already an intervention. One cannot experiment or observe without changing something in the subject of inquiry.

What does it mean to think?: we rediscover a path that the thing has already traversed.

We may say that there are two languages. First, there is language after the fact, or language as an institution, which effaces itself in order to yield the meaning which it conveys. Second, there is the language which creates itself in its expressive acts, which sweeps me on from the signs toward meaning—sedimented language and speech.

This colored surface holds itself together; it does not receive its unity from our representation or from a representation of its own.

No morality can be established a priori. Insofar as there are only abstract ends, there is no real morality. A moral imperative only emerges in contact with a situation.

Truth is not an adequation but anticipation, repetition, and slippage of meaning. Truth allows itself to be reached only through a sort of distance. The thing thought is not the thing perceived. Knowledge is not perception, speech is not one gesture among all the other gestures. For speech is the vehicle of our movement toward truth, as the body is the vehicle of our being in the world.

True development, true maturation, consists in a double phenomenon of both surpassing and maintaining the past. To truly surpass the past is also to conserve it; in becoming something more, one must not refuse to affirm what one has been.

All theory is at the same time a practice...The link between theory and practice is not one of linear dependency. It is a circular relationship where envelopment is reciprocal.

I bring the match near, I light a flimsy piece of paper, and, behold, my gesture receives inspired help from the things around, as if the chimney and the dry wood had been waiting for me to set the light, or as though the match had been nothing but a magic incantation, a call of like to like answered beyond all imagination.

Thus the highest point of truth is still only perspective.

What dreams in us is our existential field.

I am receiving and giving in the same gesture.

In a unified whole of this kind, the learned parts of a language have an immediate value as a whole, and progress is made less by addition and juxtaposition than by the internal articulation of a function which is in its own way already complete.

One does not write solely for oneself, or solely for truth, but not simply for others either. One writes. That is all, and in doing so one aims at all of that at once. Those who write imply that all of this can happen in the same movement.

There is a mythical apace where directions and positions are determined by the placement of great affective entities...In the dream, as in the myth, we learn where the phenomenon is located by sensing what our desire moves toward, what strikes fear in our hearts, and upon what our life depends.

The Wesen is sense of radiation, connected to materials, ingraspable outside of the fact or outside of existence. It is the way in which a whole is produced and reproduced, inseparable from this production. (verbal) Wesen

God is not known apart from experience, but we take hold of him in the finite.

I cut straight through the scribbling to the book, because I have built up in myself a strange expressive organism which can not only interpret the conventional meaning of the book's words and techniques but can even allow itself to be transformed and endowed with new organs by the book.