Maurice Merleau-Ponty Quotes

We know not through our intellect but through our experience.

The body is our general medium for having a world.

To understand is to experience harmony between what we aim at and what is given, between the intention and the performance - and the body is our anchorage in the world.

The body is to be compared, not to a physical object, but rather to a work of art.

We should be sensitive to the thread of silence from which the tissue of speech is woven.

Our body is not in space like things; it inhabits or haunts space. It applies itself to space like a hand to an instrument. And when we wish to move about, we do not move the body as we move an object.

I live in the facial expressions of the other, as I feel him living in mine.

I will never know how you see red and you will never know how I see it. But this separation of consciousness is recognized only after a failure of communication, and our first movement is to believe in an undivided being between us.

Everyone is alone and yet nobody can do without other people, not just because they are useful... but also when it comes to happiness.

Our own body is in the world as the heart is in the organism: it keeps the visible spectacle constantly alive, it breathes life into it and sustains it inwardly, and with it forms a system.

My own words take me by surprise and teach me what to think.

I am not in front of my body, I am in it or rather I am it... If we can still speak of interpretation in relation to the perception of one's own body, we shall have to say that it interprets itself.

We must therefore rediscover, after the natural world, the social world, not as an object or sum of objects, but as a permanent field or dimension of existence.

The flesh is at the heart of the world.

To ask for an explanation is to explain the obscure by the more obscure.

Because we are in the world, we are condemned to meaning, and we cannot do or say anything without its acquiring a name in history.

Visible and mobile, my body is a thing among things; it's caught in the fabric of the world, and its cohesion is that of a thing. But, because it moves itself and sees, it holds things in a circle around itself.

The world is... the natural setting of, and field for, all my thoughts and all my explicit perceptions. Truth does not inhabit only the inner man, or more accurately, there is no inner man, man is in the world, and only in the world does he know himself.

The phenomenological world is not the bringing to explicit expression of a pre-existing being, but the laying down of being. Philosophy is not the reflection of a pre-existing truth, but, like art, the act of bringing truth into being.

The photograph keeps open the instants which the onrush of time closes up forthwith; it destroys the overtaking, the overlapping, the metamorphosis of time.

I may speak many languages, but there remains one in which I live.

Socrates reminds us that it is not the same thing, but almost the opposite, to understand religion and to accept it.

It is the essence of certainty to be established only with reservations.

Language transcends us and yet we speak.

It is a great good fortune, as Stendhal said, for one "to have his passion as a profession.