Quotes from Maurice Merleau-Ponty

Perceived causality is evidently not that of the scientist (i.e. the relation of a function to certain variables), but rather a productive and quasi-magical causality.

There is passivity right there in activity...And there is activity right there in passivity.

The limping of philosophy is its virtue. True irony is not an alibi; it is a task; and the very detachment of the philosopher assigns to him a certain kind of action among men.

The social is at the interior of the individual and the individual is at the interior of the social, since the past individual is himself interpsychologic from birth...There is no competition between psychology and interpsychology...All is social and all is individual.

It is impossible to separate the child from cultural influences; rather, it is a false problem.

In principle, the logician is only familiar with thetic consciousness.

By institution we were intending here those events in an experience which endow the experience with durable dimensions, in relation to which a whole series of other experiences will make sense, will form a thinkable sequence or history--or again the events which deposit a sense in me, not just as something surviving or as a residue, but as the call to follow, the demand of a future.

There is a world of silence, the perceived world, at least, is an order where there are non-language significations--yes, non-language significations, but they are not accordingly positive. There is for example no absolute flux of singular Erlebnisse; there are fields and a field of fields, with a style and a typicality...and which are always a relation between the agent (I can) and the sensorial or ideal field.

All flesh, and even that of the world, radiates beyond itself.

The phenomenal layer is, literally, pre-logical and will always remain so.

By returning to phenomena, we find, as a fundamental layer, a whole already pregnant with an irreducible sense.

The same partial stimulus can give rise to variable effects and the same nerve element can function in a qualitatively different manner according to what is prescribed by the constellation of stimuli and by the elaboration to which it gives rise beyond the discontinuous sensory terminations.

There must be a presence of the past which is absence.

Every perception is the perception of something solely by way of being at the same time the relative imperception of a horizon or background which it implies but does not thematize. Perceptual consciousness is therefore indirect or even inverted in relation to an ideal of adequation which it presumes but never encounters directly.

Perhaps there are never any masters except after the fact and from afar.

Immanence is transcendence that has cooled down.

The sensible order is being at a distance--the fulgurating attestation here and now to an inexhaustible richness.

The incompleteness of the reduction is not an obstacle to the reduction, it is the reduction itself, the rediscovery of vertical being.

Things are only half - opened before us, unveiled and hidden.

Perception is already expression.

Our assurance of being in the truth is one with our assurance of being in the world.

One cannot make a direct ontology. My 'indirect' method (being in the beings) is alone conformed with being--'negative philosophy' like 'negative theology.

There are eyes at the tips of my fingers.

As the thing, as the other, the true dawns through an emotional and almost carnal experience, where the "ideas"—the other's and our own—are rather traits of his physiognomy and of our own, are less understood than welcomed or spurned in love or hatred.