Quotes from Maurice Merleau-Ponty

The thing can never be separated from someone who perceives it; nor can it ever actually be in itself because its articulations are the very ones of our existence, and because it is posited at the end of a gaze or at the conclusion of a sensory exploration that invests it with humanity. To taking up or the achievement by us of an alien intention or inversely the accomplishment beyond our perceptual powers and as a coupling of our body wit the things.

We speak of 'inspiration,' and the word should be taken literally. There really is inspiration and expiration of Being.

The world and Being hold together only in movement; it is only in this way that all things can be together. Philosophy is a reminding of this being.

Philosophy is a will to confront human artifice with its outside, with Nature.

We situate ourselves in ourselves and in the things, in ourselves and in the other, and at the point where, by a sort of chiasm, we become the others and we become the world.

Nothing is more difficult than to know precisely what we see.

A science without philosophy would literally not know what it was talking about. A philosophy without methodological exploration of phenomena would end up with nothing but formal truths, which is to say, errors.

Expression is like a step taken in the fog--no one can say where, if anywhere, it will lead.

We know not through our intellect but through our Experience

We do not have the right to level out all experience into a single world.

So it is fairly widely recognised that the relationship between human beings and things is no longer one of distance and mastery such as that which obtained between the sovereign mind and the piece of wax in Descartes' famous description. Rather, the relationship is less clear-cut: vertiginous proximity prevents us both from apprehending ourselves as a pure intellect separate from things and from defining things as pure objects lacking in all human attributes.

The swimmer unknowingly skims over a whole buried universe which would frighten him if he looked at it with undersea goggles.

Violence is the common origin of all regimes. Life, discussion, and political choice occur only against a background of violence.

the real is coherent and probable because it is real, and not real because it is coherent...

Rather than a mind and a body, man is a mind with a body, a being who can only get to the truth of things because its body is, as it were, embedded in those things.

What we call 'natural' is frequently no more than bad theory.

A 'world' has dimensions. By definition they are not the sole possible ones.

We struggle with dream figures and our blows fall on living faces.

The words most charged with philosophy are not necessarily those that contain what they say, but rather those that most energetically open upon Being, because they more closely convey the life of the whole and make our habitual evidences vibrate until they disjoin.

This swarming of words behind words, thoughts behind thoughts--this universal substitution is also a kind of stability.

It is the unconscious which chooses what aspect of us will be admitted to official existence.

The imaginary is lodged in the world.

But the spectacle perceived does not partake of pure being. Taken exactly as I see it, it is a moment of my individual history, and since sensation is a reconstitution, it pre-supposes in me sediments left behind by some previous constitution, so that I am, as a sentient subject, a repository stocked with natural powers at which I am the first to be filled with wonder.

What exists are not separated animals, but an inter-animality.