Quotes from Maurice Merleau-Ponty

I am, as a sensing subject, full of natural powers of which I am the first to be filled with wonder. Thus I am not, to recall Hegel's phrase, a 'hole in being,' but rather a hollow, or a fold that was made and that can be unmade.

From the moment we do something, we turn toward the world, stop self-questioning, and go beyond ourselves in our action. Faith--in the sense of an unreserved commitment which is never completely justified--enters the picture as soon as we leave the realm of pure geometrical ideas and have to deal with the existing world. Each of our perceptions is an act of faith in that it affirms more than we strictly know, since objects are inexhaustible and our information limited.

To say that I have a visual field means that I have an access and an opening to a system of visible beings through my position, and that they are available to my gaze in virtue of a kind of primordial contact and by a gift of nature, without any effort required on my part. In other words, it means that vision is pre-personal.

To the extent that consciousness is only consciousness of something by allowing its wake to trail behind itself, and to the extent that, to think an object, consciousness must rely upon a previously constructed 'world of thought,' there is always a de personalization at the heart of consciousness.

There is a temporal style of the world, and time remains the same because the past is a former future and a recent present, the present an impending past and a recent future, the future a present and even a past to come; because, that is, each dimension of time is treated or aimed at as something other than itself and because, finally, there is at the core of time a gaze.

Consider an angry or a threatening gesture...I do not perceive the anger or the threat as a psychological fact hidden behind the gesture, I read the anger in the gesture. The gesture does not make me think of anger, it is anger itself...Everything happens as if the other person's intention inhabited my body, or as if my intention inhabited his body...I understand the other person through my body, just as I perceive 'things' through my body.

There is an intemporal which works on the inside of time, which is, rather, omnitemporal.

The specular thing-image, or thing-'mental image' chiasm: imagination inherent to each subfield of this sense. The imaginary deploys itself in this field—which is therefore carnal. The imaginary: decentering of the sensible. The concept: decentering of the imaginary. Me-world Chiasm: the things gaze upon me. I gaze upon myself (through the eyes of the things). The chiasm is the idea of Being as the elevation of the relative to the Absolute by means of the diaphragm and the 'there is.

It has always been easy to hide violence with declarations of peace.

If we want to both inhabit our body and know it, we must be simultaneously ourselves and another.

While listening to a piece of beautiful music: impressions that this movement which is beginning is already at its end, that it is going to have been, or sinking into the future that we hold as well as the past—though we cannot say exactly what it will be. Anticipated Retrospection—retrograde movement in futuro: it is descending toward me already made.

Instead of an intelligible world there are radiant nebulae separated by expanses of darkness.

In modernity, it is not only works of art that are unfinished: the world they express is like a work which lacks a conclusion. There is no knowing, moreover, whether a conclusion will ever be added.

Phenomenological or existential philosophy assigns itself the task, not of explaining the world or of discovering its "conditions of possibility," but rather of formulating an experience of the world, a contact with the world which precedes all thought about the world.

From now on the tasks of literature and philosophy can no longer be separated. When one is concerned with giving voice to the experience of the world and showing how consciousness escapes into the world, one can no longer credit oneself with attaining a perfect transparence of expression. Philosophical expression assumes the same ambiguities as literary expression, if the world is such that it cannot be expressed except in "stories" and, as it were, pointed at.

To say "Hell is other people" does not mean "Heaven is me." If other people are the instruments of our torture, it is first and foremost because they are indispensable to our salvation. We are so intermingled with them that we must make what order we can out of this chaos.

An abyss is not nothing; it has environs & edges.

The negative principle is less identity-with-self than non-difference-with-self. This absence becomes a factor only by negation of its own negation. It is less a unity of the multiple in the living than an adhesion between the elements of the multiple. In a sense, there is only the multiple, and this totality that surges from it is not a totality in potential, but the establishment of a certain dimension.

Everything written has a political bearing, even in the case of a study on bees.

O que constitui um enigma é a sua ligação, é o que está entre elas – é o facto de eu ver as coisas no seu devido lugar, precisamente porque elas se eclipsam umas às outras –, é o serem rivais perante o meu olhar, precisamente porque cada uma está no seu lugar.

Now if we rid our minds of the idea that our language is the translation or cipher of an original text, we shall see that the idea of a complete expression is nonsensical, and that all language is indirect or allusive--that is, if you wish, silence.

What we call disorder and ruin, others who are younger live as the natural order of things.

Two things are certain about freedom: that we are never determined and yet that we never change, that, retrospectively, we can always find in our past the anticipation of what we have become.

Stiftung is not enveloping thought, but open thought, not the intended and Vorhabe of an actual center, but an 'off-center' which will be rectified, not the positing of an end, but the positing of a style, not a frontal grasp but a lateral divergence, algae brought back from the depths.