Quotes from Maurice Merleau-Ponty

Every act of reflection, every voluntary taking up of a position is established against the background and upon the proposition of a pre-personal life of consciousness.

The perceived world is the always presupposed foundation of all rationality, all value and all existence. This thesis does not destroy either rationality or the absolute. It only tries to bring them down to earth.

As the parts of my body together comprise a system, so my body and the other's are one whole, two sides of one and the same phenomenon, and the anonymous existence of which my body is the ever-renewed trace henceforth inhabits both bodies simultaneously.

The libido precisely is not a univocal orientation toward a sexual organ, but a fantastic polymorphism, a possibility of diverse 'sexual positions.' It is thus a field, a polarity, the initiation to a dimension, that is, to a body - world 'ray.

Psychoanalysis: either the last conquest of scientific and techinitionist ontology or the rediscovery of another contact with being: being that is neither for itself, nor being object, but the contradictory being of human desire.

If one completely eliminates the concept of the end of history, then the concept of revolution is relativized; such is the meaning of "permanent revolution." It means that there is no definitive regime, that revolution is the regime of creative imbalance that there will always be other oppositions to sublate, that there must therefore always be an opposition within revolution.

History is not made in advance...It depends on the will and audacity of men upon occasion, and...it contains an element of contingency and risk.

Are the limits between the ''inside'' and the "outside" so clear?

We carry in our incarnate being the alphabet & the grammar of life, but this does not presuppose an achieved meaning either in us or in it.

Far from being limited to the first years, language acquisition is coextensive with the very exercise of language.

If to do philosophy is to discover the primary sense of being, then one does not philosophize in quitting the human situation; it is necessary rather to plunge into it. The absolute knowledge of the philosopher is perception.

Superficial conceptualizations, positivist determinations of a great truth: there is the id as perception that is imperception, nonconventional thought (and not hidden adequate thought); there is the ego, the perception-consciousness apparatus, like a system of attitudes which avoid, bypass the id--(without going so far as to be consciousness of the unconscious).

We are not spectators of a closed history; we are actors in an open history, our praxis introduces the element of construction rather than knowledge as an ingredient of the world, making the world not simply an object of contemplation but something to be transformed. What we cannot imagine is a consciousness without a future and a history with an end. Thus, as long as there are men, the future will be open and there will only be a probabilistic calculation and no absolute knowledge.

Perception grounds everything because it shows us, so to speak, an obsessional relation with being; it is there before us, and yet it touches us from within.

The universal is not the concept but this perception given in flesh and blood.

Love entails a beyond oneself, the very beyond of the false desire of possession...At the mystery: how one can be non-self with all of one's strength.

The essence, likewise, is an inner framework, it is not above the sensible world, it is beneath, or in its depth, its thickness. It is the secret bond...things are Essences at the level of Nature.

The negative has its positive side, the positive its negative, and it is precisely because each has its contrary within itself that they are capable of passing into one another, and perpetually play the role of warring brothers in history.

Language is a surpassing, operated by the subject on significations he has laid down, stimulated by the use made of words around him. Language is an act of transcending. Thus, we cannot consider it to simply be a container of thought; we must see in it an instrument of conquest of self through contact with others.

Very few philosophers have been anarchists

Love is clairvoyant; it addresses us precisely to what is able to tear us apart.

Nature resists. It cannot be entirely established in front of us. The body is a nature at work within us.

Language is the system of differentiations through which the individual articulates his relation to the world.

Memory deforms reality, which nevertheless is formed as reality only in memory