Quotes from Maurice Merleau-Ponty

Freedom exists in contact with the world, not outside it.

Activity = passivity.

In advocating nonviolence one reinforces established violence.

Any commemoration is also a betrayal.

If I wanted to express perceptual experience with precision, I would have to say that one perceives in me, and not that I perceive. Every sensation includes a seed of dream or depersonalization, as we experience through this sort of stupor into which it puts us when we truly live at the level of sensation.

There is already a kind of presence of the other in me.

Philosophy is not a hospital. If people are vertiginous and want to take medication against it, I don't stop them, but I say: this is medication.

The wonderful thing about language is that it promotes its own oblivion.

Everything is science and everything is philosophy.

A field tends of itself to multiply.

Language is everything, since it is the voice of no one, since it is the very voice of things, the waves and the forests.

The relation of the human & animality is not a hierarchical relation, but lateral, an overcoming that does not abolish kinship

Man is hidden, well hidden, & this time we must make no mistake about it: this does not mean that he is there beneath a mask, ready to appear ... the situation is more serious: there are no faces underneath the masks, historical man has never been human, & yet no man is alone.

We do not have a choice between purity and violence but between different kinds of violence. Inasmuch as we are incarnate beings, violence is our lot.

To see the object is to plunge into it.

There is no longer: consciousness, projections, In itself or object. there are fields in intersection, in a field of fields.

There are several ways for a body to be a body, and several ways for consciousness to be consciousness.

The whole architecture of the notions of psychology... as differentiations of one sole and massive adhesion to being which is the flesh ...There is no hierarchy of orders of layers or planes, there is dimensionality of every fact & facticity of every dimension.

We become used to thinking that all of this exists necessarily and unshakeably.

If I wanted to render precisely the perceptual experience, I ought to say that 'one' perceives in me, and not that I perceive.

There is no universal clock, but local histories take form beneath our eyes, and begin to regulate themselves, and haltingly are linked to one another and demand to live, and confirm the powerful in the wisdom which the immensity of the risks and the consciousness of their own disorder had given them. The world is more present to itself in all its parts than it ever was.

It would then be found that the words, vowels, and phonemes are so many ways of 'singing' the world. The initial form of language, therefore, would have been a kind of song.

Each one of us knows for his own part that the world as it is, is unacceptable.

The doctrine cannot receive minorities, but neither can it reject them, because minorities are the salt of the Earth!