Quotes from Maurice Merleau-Ponty

We are in the world, mingled with it, compromised with it.

Personal life, expression, knowledge, and history advance obliquely, and not directly, toward ends or toward concepts. That which is sought too deliberately is not obtained.

If at the center and so to speak the kernel of Being there is an infinite infinite, every partial being directly or indirectly presupposes it, and is in return really or eminently contained in it. All the relationships we can have to Being must be simultaneously founded upon it.

To think is not having but not having.

I rediscover the world - which I had distinguished from myself as a sum of things or of processes tied together through causal relations - 'in myself' as the permanent horizon of all of my thoughts and as a dimension in relation to which I never cease situating myself.

There is no longer any great risk that Freudian research will shock us by recalling what there is of the 'barbarian' in us; the risk is rather that its findings will be too easily accepted in an 'idealist' form…Today there is a race toward psychoanalysis, just as there was once a flight from it. Yesterday it was the spirit of evil; today one trims its claws and adopts it.

There is the possible in the organism. The embryo is not simple matter, but matter which refers to the future.

The unfinished nature of phenomenology and the inchoate style in which it proceeds are not the signs of failure; they were inevitable because phenomenology's task was to reveal the mystery of the world and the mystery of reason.

Life is not a sort of quasi-interiority, it is only a fold, the reality of a process, as Whitehead would say, in observable up close.

W)e must - precisely in order to see the world and to grasp it as a paradox - rupture our familiarity with it, and this rupture can teach us nothing except the unmotivated springing forth of the world.

Some think that the painting does not so much express the meaning as the meaning impregnates the painting.

The idea of tradition is this double movement: being other in order to be the same, forgetting in order to conserve, producing in order to receive, looking ahead in order to receive the entire force of the past.

There is an adherence, a strange kinship between the human and the animal...of the animal as variant of humanity and of humanity as variant of animality.

Behavior develops 'in a spiral'...Every motor theme of embryonic life can be considered as a theme that will be elaborated at a higher level in postnatal life.

The origin of language is mythic; that is, there is always a language before language, which is perception.

To constitute...is nearly the opposite of to institute: the instituted makes sense without me, the constituted makes sense only for me and for the 'me' of this instant...The instituted straddles its future, has its future its temporality, the constituted depends entirely on the 'me' who constitutes (the body, the clock).

Visible being is natural...But language, art, history gravitate around the invisible (ideality).

Physical laws do not furnish an explanation of the structures, they represent an explanation within the structures. They express the least integrated structures, those in which the simple relations of function to variable can be established. They are already becoming inadequate in the 'acausal' domain of modern physics.

N)o explanatory hypothesis is more clear than the very act by which we take up this incomplete world in order to attempt to totalize it and to think it.

The concept of Nature does not evoke only the residue of what had not been constructed by me, but also a productivity which is not ours, although we can use it--that is, an originary productivity that continues beneath the artificial creations of man. It both partakes of the most ancient, and is something always new.

This passage from the indeterminate to the determinate, this continuous taking up again of its own history in the unity of a new sense, is thought itself.

To abstain from violence toward the violent is to become their accomplice.

How could it limit its investigation to one sector of reality? How could it help being pluralistic? How could it help finding the same truth everywhere?

Being is not given but rather emerges over time.