Quotes from Maurice Merleau-Ponty

Variations in Ianguage, which at first appear to support the skeptic, are ultimately the proof of its meaning, since words would not change in meaning unless they were trying to say something.

The relation to the world, such as it tirelessly announces itself within us, is not something that analysis might clarify: philosophy can simply place it before our eyes and invite us to take notice.

Animality is the logos of the sensible world: an incorporated meaning.

What is Philosophy? The domain of the Verborgen (philosophy and occultism).

True philosophy entails relearning to see the world anew.

The abyss is not to be conceived of as lack of Being, but as more than Being.

The contingency of the future, which accounts for the violent acts of those in power, by the same token deprives these acts of all legitimacy, or equally legitimates the violence of their opponents. The right of the opposition is exactly equal to the right of those in power.

Not only parallel problems: vision and its signification, speech and its signification--but a single problem: the visible and poetic signified are intertwined; poetry, speech of things (Valéry)... This is not to lose interest in the world; it is to find access through intermixing, through an imaginary within us that welcomes it and makes it at home. In a sense, it discovers it.

All writers who are unprejudiced and open to the future know what they do not want better than what they do want.

The subject of sensation is a power that is born together with a certain existential milieu or that is synchronized with it.

The body is a sensible thing, the movements of which form a...diacritical system...this system is the keystone of the world, or inversely, has the keystone in the world and opens onto the world.

It is a paradox to not want to infringe upon the will of the loved being. To love is to accept undergoing the other's influence and also to exercise influence on the other.

With the first sign, a halo of the possible appears, which was not contained in the first sign and which was unforeseeable from it,

True nothingness is not the nothing that noths, but a something always on the horizon,the positive determinations of which are the trace and absence.

From the moment of conception and still more after birth, there is an encroachment towards a future which is made from itself, under certain given conditions, and which is not the act of a donation of sense. Birth is not an act of constitution but the institution of a future. Reciprocally, institution resides in the same genus of Being as birth and is not, any more than birth, an act.

Scientific points of view are always both naïve and at the same time dishonest, because they take for granted without explicitly mentioning it, that other point of view, namely that of the consciousness, through which from the outset a world forms itself around me and begins to exist for me.

The future must not be contained in the present, but neither is it something which would be added on to the present by an a tergo necessity. The future would come from the present itself. They would continue each other.

The nature in us must have some relation to Nature outside of us; moreover, Nature outside of us must be unveiled to us by the Nature that we are.

The...present is itself a transcendent: one knows that it is not there, that it was just there, one never coincides with it--It is not a segment of time with defined contours that would come and set itself in place. It is a cycle defined by a central and dominant region and with indecisive contours--a swelling or bulb of time...an institution, a system of equivalences.

Thus, a nocturnal reality of the soul, of the incorporeal--which is not nothing--but which needs to 'adorn' itself with the visible--which is like the opposite of the visible--The visible opens onto an invisible that is its relief or its structure and where identity is rather non-difference.

The study of the appearance of animals takes on interest when we understand this appearance as a language. We must grasp the mystery of life in the way that animals show themselves to each other...There is a specular relation between animals: each is the mirror of the other...What exists are not separated animals, but an inter-animality...The identity of that which sees and that which it sees appears to be an ingredient of animality.

Contemporary politics is truly an arena in which questions are badly put, or put in such a way that one cannot side with either of the two present contestants. We are called to choose between them. Our duty is to do no such thing.

Time is never completely constituted.

Perception, which is an event, opens onto the thing perceived, which appeared to be prior to perception and to be true before it. And if perception always reaffirms the preexistence of the world, it is precisely because it is an event, because the subject who perceives is already at grips with being through the perceptual fields, the "senses.