Quotes from Maurice Merleau-Ponty

Vertical and horizontal are not grasped for themselves but in the divergence of things from them. Thus as levels. Perception of them is imperception: it's when they're destroyed that we feel them, when they function they're what we take for granted. Therefore perceptual sense = divergence with respect to a level that is not thematic. Therefore meaning here is not essence.

Love is a hollow in us, not the presence of the other.

To speak or to write is truly to translate an experience which, without the word that it inspires, would not become a text.

When I am seated at my table, I can instantly 'visualize' the parts of my body that it conceals from me. As I clench my foot inside my shoe, I can see it. I have this power even for parts of my body that I have never seen.

Heraclitus says that Nature is a child at play; it gives meaning, but in the manner of a child who is playing, and this meaning is never total.

Self and other are not two distinct substances...We are both, other and self, two variables of the same system.

The universe of thought, like that of perception, is lacunary and baroque in itself.

The perception of forms, understood very broadly as structure, grouping, or configuration should be considered our spontaneous way of seeing.

The search for the conditions of possibility is in principle posterior to an actual experience, and from this it follows that even if subsequently one determines rigorously the sine qua non of that experience, it can never be washed of the original stain of having been discovered post festum nor ever become what positively founds that experience.

The idea of chiasm, that is: every relation with being is simultaneously a taking and a being taken, the hold is held, it is inscribed and inscribed in the same being that it takes hold of.

We cannot say at what moment the decision is taken: it is always to be taken or already taken.

The positive and the negative are the two 'sides' of a Being; in the vertical world, every being has this structure (To this structure is bound the ambiguity of the consciousness...of imperception in perception...). Against the doctrine of contradiction, absolute negation, the either or--Transcendence is identity within difference.

For us a noncommunist left is this double position, posing social problems in terms of struggle and refusing the dictatorship of the proletariat.

There is a zone, a hollow, where what is not inessential, not impossible, assembles; there is no positive vision that would definitively give me the essentiality of the essence.

Does not love consist precisely in the establishment of the mirror relation?...It would then be necessary to say that love is not an illusoon, but...actual alienation. The error lies in believing that it is only an error...The mystery: how one can be non-self with all of one's strength.

At present, the development of industrial society here is marked by extraordinary disorder. Capitalism haphazardly extends its giant branches, puts the economies of nations at the mercy of dominant industries which choke their towns and highways, and destroys the classical forms of the human establishment. At all levels immense problems appear; not just techniques but political forms, motives, a spirit, reasons for living need to be found.

Ambiguity cannot be resolved, but it can be understood as ultimate.

What makes the weight, the density, the flesh of each color, each sound, each tactile texture, of the present and the world is that he who grasps them feels himself emerge from them by a sort of coiling up or redoubling, fundamentally homogenous with them, that he is the sensible coming to itself and that in return the sensible is to his eyes lime the double or an expression of his flesh.

The trans-phenomenal reality of love would be, not that of a positive being who is without doubt, but that of...a lack...the other person as occupying the entire horizon of my life and not as a positive being. Love is the same thing as privation.

Each field is a dimension, and Being is dimensionality itself.

The possibility of a universal grammar thus remains problematic, since language is made up of significations in the state of being born. This is the case because language is in movement and is not fixed.

Love is not created by circumstances, or by decision; it consists in the way questions and answers are linked together--by means of an attraction, something more slips in, we discover not exactly what we were seekimg, but something else that is interesting.

Just as the speaking subject only understands and speaks as a possessor of a system of gesticulation defined by dimensions of variation, the subject that perceives movement can only do so inasmuch as he possesses the equivalences of a sort of natural language: that's what sensory fields are, given diacritical systems with use values and characteristic equivalences. But between these fields there are also equivalences, like a common language of these dialects.

It is true that we discover the unreflected. But the unreflected we go back to is not that which is prior to philosophy or prior to reflection. It is the unreflected which is understood and conquered by reflection.