Quotes from Maurice Merleau-Ponty

I feel the substance of my body escaping through my head and crossing the limits of my objective body when an ascending elevator stops abruptly.

The body is not comprehensible in the actual.

Every external perception is immediately synonymous with a certain perception of my body, just as every perception of y body is made explicit in the language of external perception.

What then is obsolete is not the dialectic but the pretension of terminating it in an end of history, in a permanent revolution, or in a regime which, being the contestation of itself, would no longer need to be contested from the outside and, in fact, would no longer have anything outside it.

The world is a mass without gaps, an organism of colors across which the receding perspective, the contours, the angles, and the curves are set up as lines of force; the spatial frame is constituted by vibrating.

We can elaborate a valid concept of Nature only if we find something at the jointure of Being and Nothingness. Despite what Bergson says, there is a kinship between the concept of Nature and radical contingency. In order to elaborate this concept, we have to leave positivism or negativism, which maintains a separation between the objective and the subjective, and which thus makes impossible the subjective-objective that Nature will always be.

There is no freedom without a field.

There is a paradox here: the paradox of a total being which is, in advance, everything which we can be and do, and yet which would not be it without us, and which thus needs to be augmented by our own being. Our relation with being involves a double sense, the first according to which we belong to it, the second according to which it belongs to us.

Se demander si le mode est réel, ce n'est pas entendre ce que l'on dit.

Se demander si le monde et réel, ce n'est pas entendre ce que l'on dit.

The theory of the body schema is implicitly a theory of perception. We have learned to again sense our bodies; we have discovered, beneath objective and detached knowledge of the body, this other knowledge that we have of it because it is always with us and because we are bodies. It will be necessary to similarly awaken the experience of the world such as it appears to us insofar as we are in the world through our bodies, and insofar as we perceive the world with our bodies.

People would be very unhappy if they were to look closely at what lies beneath the words they use so readily. This is why they prefer, for the most part, not to do so.

It is not we who perceive, it is the thing that perceives itself yonder.

Essence and existence, imaginary and real, visible and invisible -- painting scrambles all our categories, spreading out before us its oneiric universe of carnal essences, actualized resemblances, mute meanings.

Just as there is an Ineinander of life and physiochemistry, i.e., the realization of life as a fold or a singularity of physiochemistry--or structure, so to is the human to be taken in the Ineinander with animality and Nature.

Individuals with apraxia show us through its absence an activity that is present in everyone, albeit scarcely visible, that constructs 'virtual space,' a system of correspondences between properties of my actual field and what these properties would be for me situated elsewhere or for another.

Writers don't have the impression that they are creating or inventing because they are, in effect, in the process of deciphering the hieroglyphics of their landscape.

What resists phenomenology within us -- natural being, the 'barbarous' source that Schelling spoke of -- cannot remain outside phenomenology and should have its place within it.

True philosophy entails learning to see the world anew, and in this sense, an historical account might signify the world with as much 'depth' as a philosophical treatise. We take our fate into our own hands and through reflection we become responsible for our own history, but this responsibility also comes from a decision to which we commit our lives; and in both cases it is a violent act whose truth is confirmed through its being performed.

All knowledge is established within the horizons opened up by perception.

We must recognize a sort of sedimentation of our life: when an attitude toward the world has been confirmed often enough, it becomes privileged for us...After having built my life upon an inferiority complex, continuously reinforced for twenty years, it is not likely that I would change.

The possible is the openness of the perceived world and not a system of logical Being in which we would be set up through idealization.

I can never say 'I' absolutely.

Deepen the notion of gnosia through that of praxia. It's a matter of grasping mind in its nascent state.