Quotes from Maurice Merleau-Ponty

This is an encounter between the human and the non-human, it is something like a behavior of the world.

philosophy is not a lexicon, it is not concerned with "word-meanings", it does not seek a verbal substitute for the world we see, it does not transform it into something said, it does not install itself in the order of the said or of the written as does the logician in the proposition, the poet in the word, or the musician in the music. It is the things themselves, from the depths of their silence, that it wishes to bring to expression.

And these open vortexes in the sonorous world finally form one sole vortex in which the ideas fit in with one another.

The Absolute is not only the Absolute, but also the dialectical movement of finite and infinite. The Absolute is such that it only ever appears to an other. Just as our intuition is an ek-stasis, by which we try to situate ourselves in the Absolute, so too must the Absolute leave itself and make itself in the world.

We might say that we perceive the things themselves, that we are the world that thinks itself--or that the world is at the heart of our flesh.

It belongs to the real to contract an infinity of relations into each of its moments.

Matter is 'pregnant' with its form.

For us the essential is to know precisely what the being of the world means. Here we must presuppose nothing—neither the naïve idea of being in itself, therefore, nor the correlative idea of a being of representation, of a being for the consciousness, of a being for man: these, along with the being of the world, are all notions that we have to rethink with regard to our experience of the world.

There is a knowledge of place which is reducible to a sort of co-existence with that place, and which is not simply nothing, even though it cannot be conveyed by a description.

We must accept at the same time a historical and social explanation of psychoanalysis and a psychoanalysis of the history and social facts.

I do not believe that what one gives to the sciences is taken from philosophy.

Is this the highest point of reason, to realize that the soil beneath our feet is shifting, to pompously name 'interrogation' what is only a persistent state of stupor, to call 'research' or 'quest' what is only trudging in a circle, to call 'Being' that which never fully is?

But where are these reference events and these landmarks themselves? They refer us to others, and the answer satisfies us only because we do not attend to it, because we think we are 'at home.' The question would arise again and indeed would be inexhaustible, almost insane, if we wished to situate our levels, measure our standards in their turn, if we were to ask: but where is the world itself? And why am I myself? Am I really alone to be me? Have I not somewhere a double, a twin?

The analysis of movement leads him to recognize that in every instant of movement there is a conatus toward an ulterior becoming, a something-in-motion making a circular trajectory that has a kind of memory

Production: not a tree, but bushes of several roots mixed together.

There is no sphere of immanence, no realm in which my consciousness is fully at home and secure against all risk of error.

In order to really see the world, we must break with our familiar acceptance of it.

The 'healthy' man is not so much the one who has eliminated his contradictions as the one who makes use of them and drags them into his vital labors.

The unfurling of the animal is like a pure wake that is related to no boat.

Esthesiological body and erotic body in a relation of intercorporeality in the biosphere with all animality and by introjection & projection.

There is a kinship between the concepts of nature and radical contingency.

There is no more individuated being in the system. We only ever have to deal with families of trajectories.

The generality of time, of a family of times, is derived from the fact that all these times are enveloped in a process of nature.

Moonlight and sunlight in our memory are presented before all else, not as sensory contents, but as a certain type of symbiosis, a certain manner that the outside has of invading us, a certain manner that we have of receiving it.