Quotes from Maurice Merleau-Ponty

What is there at each moment is 'structural truth,' connected to perspective, to centering, to structurimg. Of course other ways of structuring are possinle, formalizations, from which it results that the current way of structuring is surpassed, that the current way of structuring looks to be a particular case.

Expressing what exists is an endless task.

Our perception ends in objects, and the object, once constituted, appears as the reason for all the experiences of it that we had or that we could have.

We shall render explicit the cohesion of the obverse and the reverse of my body which is responsible for the fact that my body—which is visible, tangible like a thing—acquires this view upon itself, this contact with itself, where it doubles itself up, unifies itself, in such a way that the objective body and the phenomenal body turn about one another or encroach upon one another.

Philosophy is not the passage from a confused world to a universe of closed significations. On the contrary, philosophy begins with the awareness of a world which consumes and destroys our established significations but also renews and purifies them.

There is a fitting together of different perspectival views; there is no fitting together of all of them in an absolute knowledge which is completely decentered and final...The passage from the particular to the universal is never finished.

My body, which is one of the visibles, sees itself also and thereby makes itself the natural light opening its own interior to the visible, in order for the visible there to become my own landscape, realizing (as it is said) the miraculous promotion of Being to "consciousness," or (as we prefer to say) the segregation of the "within" and the "without

Through other eyes we are for ourselves fully visible.

The Revolution takes on and directs a violence which bourgeois society tolerates in unemployment and in war and disguises with the name of misfortune. But successful revolutions taken altogether have not spilled as much blood as the empires. All we know is different kinds of violence and we ought to prefer revolutionary violence because it has a future of humanism.

Someone will say: you explain nothing, you observe. But to explain is always: to bring Nature back to God or to bring it back to the spectacle of man—not to see nature. In reality, what one has to learn is that being is that,it is precisely not to explain.

Rather than imprisoning it, language is like a magic machine for transporting the 'I' into the other person's perspective.

Objects form a system in which one object cannot appear without concealing others.

The eye accomplishes the prodigious work of opening the soul to what is not soul – the joyous realm of things and their god, the sun.

One reason why the painter takes up his brush is that in one sense the art of painting still remains to be created...Painting is always something to be created.

Art stops human beings from working at their lives for a moment, and in that instant the entire truth of life is found.

When I am listening, it is not necessary that I have an auditory perception of the articulated sounds but that the conversation pronounces itself within me. It summons me and grips me; it envelops and inhabits me to the point that I cannot tell what comes from me and what from it. Whether speaking or listening, I project myself into the other person, I introduce him into my own self.

Meaning is like spots of light surrounded by rugged clouds of night, glowing islands.

Man is an historical idea, not a natural species.

The form is a visible or sonorous configuration (or even a configuration which is prior to the distinction of the senses) in which the sensory value of each element is determined by its function in the whole and varies with it...This same notion of form will permit us to describe the mode of existence of the primitive objects of perception. They are lived as realities, we have said, rather than known as true objects.

The universe is defined not by what one sees, what one says, but precisely by what one does not see, precisely what one does not say: by the difference between the one and the other.

The child and adult reflect each other like two mirrors endlessly placed face to face. The child that we believe exists is the reflection we desire. We are all indissolubly tied to the fact that the other is facing us the way we are facing him.

Traumatic experience does not survive as a representation in the mode of objective consciousness and as a 'dated' moment; it is of its essence to survive only as a manner of being and with a certain degree of generality.

Saussure may show that each act of expression becomes significant only as a modulation of a general system of expression and only insofar as it is differentiated from other linguistic gestures. The marvel is that before Saussure we did not know anything about this, and that we forget it again each time we speak--to begin with when we speak of Saussure's ideas.

History has no single signification; what we do always has several senses, and this is how an existential conception of history is distinguished from both materialism and spiritualism.