Quotes from Maurice Merleau-Ponty

In a soap bubble as in an organism, what happens at each point is determined by what happens at all the others.

We see reappearing in the revolution the very struggles it was meant to move beyond.

Forms are 'scars' of forces and forces vibrate within forms.

My own words take me by surprise and teach me what to think.

In all identification, elements of sadomasochism are present.

If Nature is not an object of thought, that is, a simple correlate of a thought, it is decidedly not a subject either, and for the same reason: its opacity, its enveloping. It is an obscure principle.

Ambiguity is not a lack of univocity. Ambiguity is 'good'...In truth, we have experience of knowledge and knowledge of experience. These two faces of ambiguity are abstractions. The absolute is that which is between the two: the transformation of one into the other. -From Philosophy and Non-Philosophy Since Hegel

The world, in those of its sectors which realize a structure, is comparable to a symphony.

Time and space are horizons and not series of things. And horizons that overlap, one over the other. I read time in space and read space in time. A single great differentiation of a single Being.

Courage consists in being reliant on oneself and others to the extent that, irrespective of differences in physical and social circumstance, all manifest in their behaviour and their relationships that very same spark which makes us recognise them, which makes us crave their assent or their criticism, the spark which means we share a common fate.

Until three months, the infant does not have the concept of his own body but only an impression of incompleteness.

In all dialogue there is an element of concrete universality.

To be conscious is, among other things, to be somewhere else.

The first exterior contact, the first exteroceptive stimulus, is the human voice.

How to rediscover the emerging sense of philosophy? By expanding our thoughts, our lived situation of the philosopher through those of the ancients, and those of the ancients by ours. This reciprocal contestation unveils the common field of which philosophies are only sections.

We are not accusing liberalism of being a system of violence; we reproach it with not seeing its own face in violence, with veiling the pact upon which it rests while rejecting as barbarous that other source of freedom—revolutionary freedom which is the origin of all social pacts.

It is a question not of putting the perceptual faith in place of reflection, but on the contrary of taking into account the total situation, which involves reference from the one to the other. What is given is not a massive and opaque world, or a universe of adequate thought; it is a reflection which turns back over the density of the world in order to clarify it, but which, coming second, reflects back to it only its own light.

It is necessary that a line, as a trace of movements, must be a rhythm, a law...a field of possibilities beyond the probable. This spatiality is meta-spatial...A line arouses the field that gives it sense by deforming the field given...It is a systematic error, 'coherent deformation'--thus each painting is the creation of a dimensionality--thus (1) the painting is a world for itself, not a copy of the world; (2) it expresses indirectly and not by returning to the object.

We do not keep the world, or situations, or others at the length of our gaze like a spectacle; we are intermingled with them, drinking them in through all our pores.

Thus the problem of Einfühlung, like that of my incarnation, opens on the meditation of sensible being; or, if you prefer, it betakes itself there. The fact is that sensible being, which is announced to me in my strictly private life, summons up within that life all other corporeality - It is the being which reaches me in my most secret parts, but which I also reach in its brute or untamed state, in an absolute of presence which holds the secret of the world , others, and what is true.

The imaginary, said properly...is the carnal double, internal equivalent, secret figure of the real.

A perceived thing is... a certain variation in relation to a norm or to a spatial, temporal, or colored level, it is a certain distortion, a certain "coherent deformation" of the permanent links which unite us to sensorial fields and to a world.

There is no contradiction between reflection as enveloping the past and the past as enveloping my present, because we are communicating through the depth-dimension. According to the depth-dimension, we are in the past and the past lives in us...We are moments of the open field...which is Sinngenesis, sense in genesis, emerging once and for all.

In this transgression, one does not know who is engulfing and who is engulfed.